quotes of books barry lopez
Barry Lopez
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I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.
NoorBook
How do people imagine the landscapes they find themselves in? How does the land shape the imaginations of the people who dwell in it? How does desire itself, the desire to comprehend, shape knowledge?
I felt a calmness birds can bring to people; and, quieted, I sensed here the outlines of the oldest mysteries: the nature and extent of space, the fall of light from the heavens, the pooling of time in the present, as if it were water.
What does it mean to grow rich?
Is it to have red-blooded adventures and to make a ‘fortune,’ which is what brought the whalers and other entrepreneurs north?
Or is it, rather, to have a good family life and to be imbued with a far-reaching and intimate knowledge of one’s homeland, which is what the Tununirmiut told the whalers at Pond’s Bay wealth was?
Is it to retain a capacity for awe and astonishment in our lives, to continue to hunger after what is genuine and worthy? Is it to live at moral peace with the universe?
For some people, who they imagine they are does not end where the boundary of the skin meets the world. It continues with the reach of their senses out into the land. If the land in which they live is summarily disfigured or reorganized by industrial development, it causes them psychological pain.
I would bow slightly with my hands in my pockets, toward the birds and the evidence of life in their nests--because of their fecundity, unexpected in this remote region, and because the serene arctic light that came down over the land like breath, like breathing.
Men of character continued to sail to their death for men of greed.
And there was no ultimate reality—any culture that would judge the perceptions of another, particularly one outside its own traditions, should proceed cautiously.
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.
The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent inits meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.
They have a quality of nuannaarpoq, of taking extravagant pleasure in being alive; and they delight in finding it in other people.
At the heart of this story, I think, is a simple, abiding belief: it is possible to live wisely on the land, and to live well. And in behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
The frozen ocean itself still turns in its winter sleep like a dragon.
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
I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.
the world is ever so slightly but uncorrectably out of focus, that there are no absolutely precise answers. Whatever
In any new country we want panoramas.
Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint.
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.
on my right Baker Creek has cut a steep-banked gash into the badlands to the west.
