Barry Lopez Land Quotations

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.

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.

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.

The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.

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

We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.

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

The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.