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It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Defaced
Dismembered
Salvation
Impossible
Language
World

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.
Wendell Berry
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At home the great delight is to see the clover and grass now growing on places that were bare when we came. These small healings of the ground are my model accomplishment-everything else I do must aspire to that. While I was at that work the world gained with every move I made, and I harmed nothing.
Wendell Berry
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To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn't acknowledge limits.
Wendell Berry
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A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
Wendell Berry
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In order to survive, a plurality of true communities would require not egalitarianism and tolerance but knowledge, an understanding of the necessity of local differences, and respect. Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.
Wendell Berry
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If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.
Wendell Berry
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The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.
Wendell Berry
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The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.
Wendell Berry
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My label is just good farming, which isn't something you can put on a t-shirt.
Wendell Berry
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When the mind's an empty room The clear days come.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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What would be the point of being personally whole in a dismembered society, or personally healthy in a land scalped, eroded and poisoned, or personally free in a world entirely controlled by the government or enlightened by television?
Wendell Berry
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A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things it means putting first things first.
Wendell Berry
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Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents.
Wendell Berry
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The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.
Wendell Berry
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The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.
Wendell Berry