Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World Quotes

“the skill of staying poised in worrying times. To survive what’s headed our way—global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments—and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will need to trust each other, because today, it’s as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“Each place is itself only, and nowhere repeated”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“Only the misled can insist that heaven awaits the righteous while they watch the fires on Earth consume the only heaven we have ever known.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the endless complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermines the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“It is not possible for human beings to outgrow loneliness. Nor can someone from a culture that condescends to nature easily escape the haunting thought that one’s life is meaningless.

Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.

The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

“Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc—ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war—we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas—the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life-destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak, and that to be generous is to be foolish—can have no future with us.

It is more important now to be in love than to be in power. It is more important to bring E. O. Wilson’s biophilia into our daily conversations than it is to remain compliant in a time of extinction, ethnic cleansing, and rising seas. It is more important to live for the possibilities that lie ahead than to die in despair over what has been lost.

Only an ignoramus can imagine now that pollinating insects, migratory birds, and pelagic fish can depart our company and that we will survive because we know how to make tools. Only the misled can insist that heaven awaits the righteous while they watch the fires on Earth consume the only heaven we have ever known.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

“Cancer, of course, is a teacher, and I'm writing down the lessons. It teaches empathy and compassion. It teaches patience and forbearance, with all that seems to be failing in the world. It teaches tolerance of the mess we and others make of our lives. It changes one's ambitions profoundly. It teaches the strengths to be found in community, which are different from the strengths to be found in individual striving. It teaches one to adapt.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

“Existential loneliness and a sense that one's life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning of belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place, a continually refreshed sense of the endless complexity of patterns in the natural world. Patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer undermines the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

“diversity is not, as I had once thought, a characteristic of life. It is, instead, a condition necessary for life”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

“To eliminate diversity would be like eliminating carbon and expecting life to go on.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“Is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“We must invent overnight, figuratively speaking, another kind of civilization, one more cognizant of limits, less greedy, more compassionate, less bigoted, more inclusive, less exploitive.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“When I began a deliberate inquiry into my past, starting in 1989, I thought of myself as a man walking around with shrapnel sealed in his flesh, and I wanted to get the fragments out. The doubts and images I had put aside for years were now starting to fester. I felt more or less continually seasick, confronting every day a harrowing absence within myself. I imagined it as a mine shaft of bleak, empty space, which neither the love of a spouse nor the companionship of friends nor professional success could efface. The thought began to work on me that a single, bold step, however, some sort of confrontation with the past, might sufficiently jar this frame of mind and change it. I could, I thought, dramatically cure myself in this way.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“After a while I began to see that the horror was more elusive, that it included more than just betrayals and denials and being yanked around in Shier's bed like a rag doll. The enduring horror was that I had learned to accommodate brutalization.”
― Barry Lopez, EMBRACE FEARLESSLY THE BURNING WORLD: Essays

“The scope of what must be resisted today -- imagine, by itself, the juggernaut of ever present advertising, its promises of wealth, power, beauty, ease, youth, its beguiling dead ends -- is breathtaking.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

“It strikes me often on our journey how a distracted life, a life strung between competing desires, has now become ordinary life for many people in Western cultures. Conscientious devotion to a single task...not only seems tedious to many, it's even disparaged now as obsessive.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

“In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California, and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

“Successfully locating the proper frame of mind and then acting is not, I think, about refusing to accommodate fear. It’s about the cultivation of love.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“I spend the day unpacking and reading mail. In the afternoon I go for a long walk in the woods around my rural home, troubled by the many human scenes of grief, embarrassment, and disbelief I witnessed at the main Auschwitz camp and at Birkenau. I wonder why there are no billboards on those grounds, telling us, say, of Stalin and the Gulags in Siberia that were to come later. Of the rise of Marcos, Stroessner, Charles Taylor, Milošević. I recall the Mothers of the Disappeared in Buenos Aires in the 1980s, shouting “¡Nunca más!” And then later those same words in Chile. And after that, in Nicaragua.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“have a plan for the triumph of good, but deny us a knowledge of the particulars of these plans, we are on the verge of arrangements that lead to murder if we say yes.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“I have traveled to nearly eighty countries doing research as a writer, and when I am asked where I would most like to go in the world, I always say the same thing: Here. Here is where I have had the longest conversation with the world outside myself. Here is where I have tested the depths of that world and found myself still an innocent. Here is where the woods are familiar and ever new.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

“recognize in these photographs the resilience, determination, and concern for the fate of humanity that these photographers possess. And I would ask you further to consider how integral to American Geography is the idea of an ensemble of work like this. While there is individual genius behind many of these pictures, it is the community of artists, the absence of overbearing individual sentiment, that stands out here.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“To consider that the honeybee and the wild horse have their own integrity and perhaps even their own aspirations, and can no longer be viewed as subjects, willing to participate in the construction of a world built to serve the needs and desires of human beings alone.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

“The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once wrote that it was impossible for his country and the United States to have a productive conversation. Mexico, he said, is so burdened by its past it cannot easily imagine a future. The United States, he said, is so intent on imagining its future it isn’t troubled by rewriting its past to serve that future.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World