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I think the issues of identity mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.
Wendell Berry
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We clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us; we enter the little circle of each other's arms, and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance, and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.
Wendell Berry
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We live in a wilderness, in which we and our works occupy a tiny space and play a tiny part. We exist under its dispensation and by its tolerance.
Wendell Berry
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I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.
Wendell Berry
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The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.
Wendell Berry
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Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.
Wendell Berry
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And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present
Wendell Berry
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I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place. I find no peace or grace. We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men....
Wendell Berry
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We are now, measurably, reducing the availability of these life-supporting goods which we can think of (though only on the conditions of good health and good care) as self-renewing or "sustainable." We are also destroying rapidly the supplies of the fossil fuels, which are limited and not renewable, and on which we have become totally dependent.
Wendell Berry
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I hear from readers a good deal, and I try to answer every letter. I think, because of my commitment to issues of conservation and good agriculture and peaceableness, they find something hopeful in my work.
Wendell Berry
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Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.
Wendell Berry
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If you establish, or reestablish, local economies on the right scale and with the right standard, then politics would come right as a matter of course. I don't know what you'd call the result - probably not capitalism or socialism.
Wendell Berry
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To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.
Wendell Berry
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The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance-almost is the revelation of ignorance.
Wendell Berry
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Action can only be understood in relation to place; only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place.
Wendell Berry
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And if we ask what are the cultural resources that can inform and sustain a proper creaturely and stewardly awareness of the lives in a farmer's keeping, I believe that we will find them gathered under the heading of husbandry.
Wendell Berry
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It is understood that nonhuman creatures adapt to their places or they don't live. And for some reason that I can't figure out, even the biologists have excused our own species from that obligation. I think there's going to be a biological penalty to be paid for that eventually.
Wendell Berry
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At home the great delight is to see the clover and grass now growing on places that were bare when we came. These small healings of the ground are my model accomplishment-everything else I do must aspire to that. While I was at that work the world gained with every move I made, and I harmed nothing.
Wendell Berry
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Our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land
Wendell Berry
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The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales; an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.
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It is better to buy from a small, privately owned local store than from a chain store. It is better to buy a good product than a bad one. Do not buy anything you don't need. Do as much as you can for yourself. If you cannot do something for yourself, see if you have a neighbor who can do it for you. Do everything you can to see that your money stays as long as possible in the local community.
Wendell Berry
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In this state of total consumerism-which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves-all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.
Wendell Berry
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We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.
Wendell Berry
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All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows....
Wendell Berry
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You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.
Wendell Berry
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Wendell Berry
Born:
August 5, 1934
(age 89)
Bio:
Wendell E. Berry is an American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. A prolific author, he has written many novels, short stories, poems, and essays.
Known for:
Hannah Coulter (2004)
Jayber Crow (2000)
That distant land (2002)
A place on earth (1967)
What are people for? (1991)
Most used words:
love
people
live
life
food
time
free
economy
local
work
violence
war
place
living
power
Wendell Berry on Wikipedia
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