Quote

If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

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
Kind
Full
Impermanence
Life
Dies
Worms
Death
Soil
Given
Kinds
Also
Dying
Earth
Healthy
Nothing
Health
Microorganisms
Long
Dead
Fungi

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.
Wendell Berry
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The country where he lives is haunted by the ghost of an old forest. In the cleared fields where he gardens and pastures his horses it stood once, and will return. There will be a resurrection of the wild. Already it stands in wait at the pasture fences.
Wendell Berry
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We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.
Wendell Berry
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The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.
Wendell Berry
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To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.
Wendell Berry
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If you establish, or reestablish, local economies on the right scale and with the right standard, then politics would come right as a matter of course. I don't know what you'd call the result - probably not capitalism or socialism.
Wendell Berry
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The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.
Wendell Berry
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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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Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.
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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The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflied that fly up in flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.
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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This, I thought, is what is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.
Wendell Berry
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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
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We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
Wendell Berry
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We are alive within mystery, by miracle... We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say.
Wendell Berry
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We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being humans not by trying to be gods.
Wendell Berry
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Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.
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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People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
Wendell Berry