Annual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
WENDELL BERRYThese are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
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To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes.
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And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.
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I’m a writer more than I am a talker.
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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
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Why should conservationists have a positive interest in… farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
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The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
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If we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.
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It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself… something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.
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The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.
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We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it.
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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
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This, I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it.
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We have to regard them as gifts because we couldn’t make them. We have to regard them as good gifts because we couldn’t live without them.
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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
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I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.
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The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
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The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
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And to take good care of it, we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.
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If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.
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