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.
WENDELL BERRYWhether we or our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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 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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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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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 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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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.
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I’m a writer more than I am a talker.
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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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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