My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
WENDELL BERRYThere are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose.
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When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while, you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.
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Annual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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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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There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
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To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
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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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We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
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If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far:
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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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The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.
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Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
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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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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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I’m a writer more than I am a talker.
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A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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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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We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it.
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I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever.
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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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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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