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 BERRYIf we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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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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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 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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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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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 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.
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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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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 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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A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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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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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 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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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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Why should conservationists have a positive interest in… farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
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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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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 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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The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.
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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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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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I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…
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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 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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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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