Quotes from Barry Lopez

With the loss of self-consciousness, the landscape opens.

You smell like the woods.

Our first wisdom as a species, that unique metaphorical knowledge that distinguishes us, grew out of such an intimacy with the earth; and, however far we may have come since that time, it did not seem impossible to me that night to go back and find it. I wanted to enquire among these people, for what we now decide to do in the North has a certain frightening irrevocability about it.

In its secular rendering the unicorn was a creature of nobility and awesome though benign power. It was a creature of compassion, though solitary, and indomitably fierce

And one can better understand figures in arctic exploration so obsessed with their own achievement that they found it irksome to acknowledge the Eskimos, unnamed companions, and indefatigable dogs who helped them.

A Chipewyan guide named Saltatha once asked a French priest what lay beyond the present life. 'You have told me heaven is very beautiful,' he said. 'Now tell me one more thing. Is it more beautiful than the country of the muskoxen in the summer, when sometimes the mist blows over the lakes, and sometimes the water is blue, and the loons cry very often? That is beautiful. If heaven is still more beautiful, I will be glad. I will be content to rest there until I am very old.

bring our own worlds to bear in foreign landscapes in order to clarify them for ourselves. It is hard to imagine that we could do otherwise. The risk we take is of finding our final authority in the metaphors rather than in the land. To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one's own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

And there was no ultimate reality—any culture that would judge the perceptions of another, particularly one outside its own traditions, should proceed cautiously.

Quando, dalle prigioni delle nostre città, volgiamo lo sguardo alla wilderness, quando il nostro intelletto sperimenta il privilegio di condurre una vita scevra da convenzioni insensate o senza colpe né sotterfugi, in breve, una vita integra, credo che possiamo rivolgerci al lupo. In esso percepiamo il coraggio, la resistenza e un modo di vivere franco e leale; percepiamo che è in armonia con l'universo mentre noi non lo siamo ancora.

Voglio dire solo questo: non conosciamo affatto gli animali. Non possiamo comprenderli se non in termini di nostre esigenze ed esperienze; e avvicinarci a un popolo con cui condividiamo il pianeta e il fascino per i lupi ma che proviene da una dimensione spazio-temporale differente e che, per quanto ne sappiamo, è molto più vicino ai lupi di quanto potremo mai esserlo noi.

on my right Baker Creek has cut a steep-banked gash into the badlands to the west.

Ancorammo la barca al riparo dal vento, entrammo nella baracca, ci cambiammo e preparammo la cena. Il nostro sollievo si espresse in una serie di battute scherzose, a spese l'uno dell'altro. Mangiammo in silenzio, andammo a letto e dormimmo come orsi d'inverno.

To be inspired is to feel God funnelling into one's work. We always want light from the darkness. We know something is there before we see it. The objective for a writer is to try to get some part of the face of a God on a piece of paper. It is a fearful undertaking going into something profound without knowing what you are looking for. Beauty is incomprehensible. Isn't that what God is? Witnessing the loss of beauty and the enduring effort to restore beauty, isn't this God?

Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas.

Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.

What perished with their cultures were their unique ideas of what it meant to be courteous, reverent, courageous, and just. What disappeared with them were their thoughts about what could be expected to be going on in the places into which we cannot see. As our own cultures continue to unfold around the riptides of aggressive commerce and heedless development, it seems these thoughts might have been good things to have made note of.

Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking-through, a theory of rivers, of trees moving, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening of the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying with a staff, the practice of wood.

To go in search of what once was is to postpone the difficulty of living with what is.

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but in oneself? There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.

Its only boundary was the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine.

Traveling encourages the revision of received wisdoms and the shedding of prejudices. It turns the mind toward a consideration of context and releases it from the dictatorship of absolute truths about humanity.

I took several long walks in the Wright and adjacent Taylor Valleys. I did not feel insignificant on these journeys, dwarfed or shrugged off by the land, but superfluous. It is a difficult landscape to enter, and to develop a rapport with. It is not inimical or hostile, but indifferent, utterly remote, even as you stand in it. The light itself is aloof.

For me, the ability to listen carefully to another person's perspective, rather than summarily deciding what that person means, is in keeping with the behavior one expects of an elder. And the ability to understand what someone else is thinking is the foundation of stable social order.