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.
WENDELL BERRYThe 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.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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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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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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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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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.
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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
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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 two great aims of industrialism – replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy – seem close to fulfillment.
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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 learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it.
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There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
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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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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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The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.
WENDELL BERRY