Barry Lopez - Land Quotes

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Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?

Barry Lopez

The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.

Barry Lopez

The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard...be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.

Barry Lopez

Watching the animals come and go, and feeling the land swell up to meet them and then feeling it grow still at their departure, I came to think of the migrations as breath, as the land breathing. In spring a great inhalation of light and animals. The long-bated breath of summer. And an exhalation that propelled them all south in the fall.

Barry Lopez

In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.

Barry Lopez

The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by the land as it is by genes.

Barry Lopez