Paul Hoy > Paul's Quotes

“I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.”
― Jim Harrison

“Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.”
― Jim Harrison, Wolf False Memoir

“Calligraphy of geese
against the sky-
the moon seals it.”
― Buson Yosa

“Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.”
― Barry Lopez

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

“Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves. ”
― Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel

“The range of the human mind, the scale and depth of the metaphors the mind is capable of manufacturing as it grapples with the universe, stand in stunning contrast to the belief that there is only one reality, which is man's, or worse, that only one culture among the many on earth possesses the truth.
To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, "There could be more, there could be things we don't understand," is not to damn knowledge. It is to take a wider view. It is to permit yourself an extraordinary freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you may be right.”
― Barry Holstun Lopez

“Eden is a conversation. It is the conversation of the human with the Divine. And it is the reverberations of that conversation that create a sense of place. It is not a thing, Eden, but a pattern of relationships, made visible in conversation. To live in Eden is to live in the midst of good relations, of just relations scrupulously attended to, imaginatively maintained through time. Altogether we call this beauty.”
― Barry Lopez

“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.”
― Barry Lopez

“Because you have seen something doesn't mean you can explain it. Differing interpretations will always abound, even when good minds come to bear. The kernel of indisputable information is a dot in space; interpretations grow out of the desire to make this point a line, to give it direction. The directions in which it can be sent, the uses to which it can be put by a culturally, professionally, and geographically diverse society are almost without limit. The possibilities make good scientists chary.”
― Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination And Desire In A Northern Landscape

“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
― Barry Lopez

“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.”
― Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

“When the stories were over, four or five of us walked out the home of our host. The surrounding land, in the persistent light of a far northern summer, was still visible for miles--striated, pitched massifs of the Brooks Range; the shy, willow-lined banks of the John River flowing south from Anaktuvuk Pass; and the flat tundra plain, opening with great affirmation to the north. The landscape seemed alive because of the stories. It was precisely these ocherous tones, the kind of willow, exactly this austerity that had informed the wolverine narratives. I felt exhilaration, and a deeper confirmation of what I had heard. The mundane task that awaited me I anticipated now with pleasure. The stories had renewed in me a sense of the purpose of my life.”
― Barry Lopez

“No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.”
― Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

“Walk on air against your better judgement.”
― Seamus Heaney

“If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.”
― Seamus Heaney, District and Circle

“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face."

[The Autumnal]”
― John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose

“We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.”
― Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecherr

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“We were together. I forget the rest.”
― Walt Whitman

“Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”
― Walt Whitman

“Lucidity is the wound closest to the sun.”
― Rene Char

“True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow”
― Edward Hoagland

“The days are stacked against what we think we are.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow
by I don't know what.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“‎I wish Barry Lopez would write novels.

from "Conversations with Jim Harrison”
― Jim Harrison

“Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.”
― Wallace Stevens

“I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.”
― Wallace Stevens