Quote

At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the windwaves close to the far bank. What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild.

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
Like
Among
Wild
Hens
Behinds
Woods
Duck
Behind
Rivers
Ducks
Looking
Road
Sits
Lying
Window
Bank
Musing
Littles
Lies
Wilderness
Upstream
Little
Understood
River
Paddling
Looks
Close
Brown
Musings

More quotes by 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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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 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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It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.
Wendell Berry
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As long as we insist on relating to it strictly on our own terms-as strange to us or subject to us-the wilderness is alien, threatening, fearful.
Wendell Berry
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If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.
Wendell Berry
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So it is that the life force may take possession of a man-- so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.
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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The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.
Wendell Berry
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There are no unsacred places there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
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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Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world? (pg. 215, Economy and Pleasure)
Wendell Berry
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Why I am NOT going to buy a computer
Wendell Berry
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It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.
Wendell Berry
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We conservatives bemoan the decline in values that has besieged our society. Why then should we not abhor the lack of morality involved in discharging untested chemicals into the air, ground, and water to alter and harm, to whatever degree, human life and wildlife? As a conservative, I do abhor it.
Wendell Berry
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What can't be helped must be endured.
Wendell Berry
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Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.
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