104 Quotes by Barry López

A thought that stayed with me was that I had entered a private place in the earth. I had seen exposed nearly its oldest part. I had lost my sense of urgency, rekindled a sense of what people were, clambering to gain access to high waterfalls and a sense of our endless struggle as a species to understand time and to estimate the consequences of our acts.

All we have is compassion and stories.

Physical places ... shape the attitudes of visitors arriving from distant homelands ... the nature of the visited place affects the very tone of a journal entry. It influences the selection of the facts one chooses to jot down about that place.

... the historian who visits a place writes a different history than the historian who stays at home, satisfied to read about a place someone else once visited

One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it--like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalog of events.

Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.

The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you

Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and associations, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.