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 BERRYI 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.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
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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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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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To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
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To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we ‘know’ that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
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All right, every day ain’t going to be the best day of your life, don’t worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.
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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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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.
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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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The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.
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The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
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A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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These 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.
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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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The only time I’ve been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
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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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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
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We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
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Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
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The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
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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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