Barry Lopez Quotes

I try to make really close bonds with people.

Family life is the backbone of mankind, and that life is dependent upon mutual giving, sharing, and receiving from each other. It entails the proper use of each other's successes and failures for mutual up-building.

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.

The more people see that they are being understood, they become more motivated to understand your point of view.

COMMUNICATION: If I had to pick a first rule of communication-the one practice above all others that opens the door to connecting with others-it would be to look for common ground. Too often people see communication as the process of transmitting massive amounts of information to other people. But that's the wrong picture. Communication is a journey. The more that people have in common, the better the chance that they can take that journey together.

I'm not an isolated person. The more I connect to people, the more I have the feeling that things work.

I think romance is friendship and attraction sort of meeting together and that does influence what I'm writing a lot. I try to establish the attraction, obviously, but I also think it's important to show the characters having actual conversations about things other than their feelings for each other - and to develop their friendship on the page.

If you love it enough, anything will talk with you.

I still like the relationship part of any story. You don't want your character to figure everything out and then at the end of the day, go home and eat soup from a can by herself.

Much unhappiness comes from walking alone. When there are several, it's somewhat different. I must get into the habit of listening to others, for what the others say concerns me, too.

If you're understood in maybe, I don't know, 60% of your soul by your partner, that's fantastic. Don't expect that it's going to be 100%. Of course you will be lonely.

If you are sitting on the couch with the TV off, and you are looking into each other's eyes and talking, that is quality time - so is taking a walk or going out to eat, so long as you are communicating with each other.

I think that sharing experiences with a person is very valuable, because it allows you to have a bond to become closer.

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.

It's an honest place to be if you don't understand someone else's experience, but there's no way for the other to understand if a conversation or an explanation isn't made.

Loving friendships provide us with a space to experience the joy of community in a relationship where we learn to process all our issues, to cope with differences and conflict while staying connected.

Talk was like the vitamins of our friendship: Large daily doses kept it healthy.

When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.

Soul grows in communion. Word by word, story by story, for better or worse, we build our world. From true conversation - speaking and listening - communication deepens into compassion and creates community.

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.

The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk anymore, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories.

Only through communication can human life hold meaning.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

It's a lot easier to find a friend on television than love.

After about 20 years of marriage, I'm finally starting to scratch the surface of what women want. And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate.