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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
Contemporary
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Writer
Mailbox
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Mailboxes
Every
Thoreau
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More quotes by Wendell Berry

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When you have large-scale legitimated violence in a place that is divided as profoundly and bitterly as Kentucky was, the legitimate violence can cause illegitimate violence, a terrible local heartlessness and cruelty that feeds on itself and goes on and on.
Wendell Berry
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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
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I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.
Wendell Berry
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Finally from the crease of the ravine I am following, there begins to come the trickling and splashing of water. There is a great restfulness in the sounds these small streams make they are going down as fast as they can, but their sound seem leisurely and idle, as if produced like gemstones with the greatest patience and care.
Wendell Berry
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Invest in the millenium.
Wendell Berry
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The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
Wendell Berry
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You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough
Wendell Berry
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The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.
Wendell Berry
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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
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We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.
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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Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.
Wendell Berry
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The securest guarantee of the long-term good health of both farmland and city is, I believe, locally produced food.
Wendell Berry
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The world is not given by our fathers but borrowed from our children.
Wendell Berry
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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. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
Wendell Berry
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It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.
Wendell Berry
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A sustainable agriculture is one which depletes neither the people nor the land.
Wendell Berry
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You're making the grant of affection, forbearance, mercy, out of your own experience and, of course, out of cultural tradition. You're saying, to use the well-worn analogy, if I love my children, that puts me under obligation to assume that other people love theirs.
Wendell Berry
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If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.
Wendell Berry
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We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.
Wendell Berry