I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.
WENDELL BERRYTo 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.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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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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I’m a writer more than I am a talker.
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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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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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The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
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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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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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There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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