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 BERRYIndustrial 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.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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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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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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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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Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
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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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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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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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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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We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
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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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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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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
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There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
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