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.
WENDELL BERRYI 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.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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Whether 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.
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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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I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.
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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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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
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We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.
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There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
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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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I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…
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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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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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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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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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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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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.
WENDELL BERRY