Barry Lopez Quotes

Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.

We know that without food we would die. Without fellowship, life is not worth living.

One of the key qualities of all stories is that they are made to be shared.

My theme is, 'The spirit of friendship is the balance of life.' Not money. Not the World Series. It's friendship. The relationships I have with people, that's enough to keep me happy.

And for a moment, I understand that I have friends on this lonely path; that sometimes your place is not something you find, but something you have when you need it.

Community means that people come together around the table, not just to feed their bodies, but to feed their minds and their relationships.

Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.

Storytelling is how we survive, when there's no feed, the story feeds something, it feeds the spirit, the imagination. I can't imagine life without stories, stories from my parents, my culture. Stories from other people's parents, their culture. That's how we learn from each other, it's the best way. That's why literature is so important, it connects us heart to heart.

We are not, and never need be, alone.

We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests. And that's where I put myself: as a storyteller. Not necessarily a high priestess, but certainly the storyteller. And I would love to be the storyteller of the tribe.

A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told and retold, a most valuable exercise, for the story retold is the story reexamined over and over again at different levels of intellectual and emotional growth.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.

I love storytelling, you know, beyond anything. I love a great story beyond a great performance. Storytelling is about what we all do together and how we collaborate together. A performance can be a collaboration in ways, but oftentimes it's one individual thing.

Honestly, I’m happiest when I’m with my best friend and we’re just laughing about life and times, there is nothing greater than friendship in this world. And that kind of sort of mutual acceptance ; to feel known and understood by people and to feel like you know and understand them back is all you can ask for.

But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.

We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — "Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought."

Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.

Your empathy for other mothers is such a natural instinct and it's such a beautiful thing that we all connect, and we should all help each other.

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.

You can get connections in lots of ways. You can get it by a friendship. You can get it by a dog. You can get it by a child. You can get it by being attached to a cause. You can get it by having huge problems and sharing those problems with other people.

The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled .. (they) helped the community live though one more darkness, with eyes wide open, and with hearts set alight.

He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

Each way means loneliness -- and communion.