Barry Lopez

“If I have any lasting worth, it is in knowing I have been a witness.”

“Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”

“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

“One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where he can live in peace.”

“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.”

“To be intimate with this land is to enclose it in your spirit.”

“How is it that one animal, our animal, can create such beauty and such horror?”

“What is it we want? To be safe. What is it we are after? Not to be harmed. What is it we want? To be free.”

“The core of this belief is that everything is sacred and that we are related to everything.”

“We can't make the world a better place until we're willing to be vulnerable.”

“I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know.”

“A significant mistake people make is to confuse information with knowledge.”

“The desire to find a place in the world is a human constant.”

“The land is not a commodity, not a resource. It is an entity, and it has a voice.”

“The things that are most important to us are the things we can't measure.”