Barry Lopez Wolf Quotes & Sayings

The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul. — Barry Lopez

Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves. — Barry Lopez

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

I remember sitting in this cabin in Alaska one evening reading over the notes of all these encounters, and recalling Joseph Campbell, who wrote in the conclusion to 'Primitive Mythology' that men do not discover their gods, they create them. So do they also, I thought, looking at the notes before me, create their animals. — Barry Lopez

Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas. — Barry Lopez

It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it does demean them to kill the animal for it. — Barry Lopez