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It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.
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
Abuse
Known
Use
Country
People
Preserve
Preserves
More quotes by Wendell Berry
We live the given life, and not the planned.
Wendell Berry
A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.
Wendell Berry
We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. (pg. 43, The Unsettling of America)
Wendell Berry
To accept that there is nothing to do is to despair. It is to become in some fundamental way less than human. Those of us who are protesting are protesting in part for our own sake to keep ourselves whole as human beings.
Wendell Berry
It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
Wendell Berry
I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.
Wendell Berry
The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.
Wendell Berry
I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place. I find no peace or grace. We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men.
Wendell Berry
The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day. I have loved it even in the rain. Sometimes I have loved it most in the rain.
Wendell Berry
To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.
Wendell Berry
One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.
Wendell Berry
Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.
Wendell Berry
Don't pray for the rain to stop pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.
Wendell Berry
Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it's conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.
Wendell Berry
The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance-almost is the revelation of ignorance.
Wendell Berry
An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
Wendell Berry
The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.
Wendell Berry
The more local and settled a culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert... a man with a machine and inadequate culture... is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.
Wendell Berry
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
Wendell Berry
Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Wendell Berry
