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One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox.

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
House
Mailboxes
Every
Thoreau
Comparing
Conventions
Strongest
Contemporary
Compare
Writer
Mailbox

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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An agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking & good eating
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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But the sower going forth to sow sets foot into time to come, the seeds falling on his own place. He has prepared a way for his life to come to him, if it will. Like a tree, he has given roots to the earth, and stands free.
Wendell Berry
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Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.
Wendell Berry
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For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land.
Wendell Berry
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No individual life is an end in itself. One can live fully only by participating fully in the succession of the generations, in death as well as in life. Some would say (and I am one of them) that we can live fully only by making ourselves answerable to the claims of eternity as to those of time.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.
Wendell Berry
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The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.
Wendell Berry
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Healing is impossible in loneliness it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation. (pg.99, The Body and the Earth)
Wendell Berry
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You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.
Wendell Berry
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The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside.
Wendell Berry
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If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?
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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The developed nations had given to the free market the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.
Wendell Berry
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There are some things the arrogant mind does not see it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.
Wendell Berry
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We are now, measurably, reducing the availability of these life-supporting goods which we can think of (though only on the conditions of good health and good care) as self-renewing or sustainable. We are also destroying rapidly the supplies of the fossil fuels, which are limited and not renewable, and on which we have become totally dependent.
Wendell Berry
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The law is meant to work for justice. But people who know themselves know that, at some point, justice had better be mitigated by mercy. And you don't get to mercy by a legal principle. You get to mercy by way of imagination, sympathy, tenderness of heart - which are not weaknesses.
Wendell Berry
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The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
Wendell Berry
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Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.
Wendell Berry