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

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!
Wendell Berry
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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
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Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact it is not a quantity.
Wendell Berry
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I hear from readers a good deal, and I try to answer every letter. I think, because of my commitment to issues of conservation and good agriculture and peaceableness, they find something hopeful in my work.
Wendell Berry
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I dream of a quiet man / who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows / where the rarest wildflowers / are blooming, and who goes, / and finds that he is smiling / not by his own will.
Wendell Berry
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You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.
Wendell Berry
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The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an object. This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.
Wendell Berry
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It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.
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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Today, local economies are being destroyed by the 'pluralistic,' displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.
Wendell Berry
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Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.
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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The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.
Wendell Berry
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When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.
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 can fight the global economy with a strong local economy.
Wendell Berry
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Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Wendell Berry
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I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.
Wendell Berry
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A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.
Wendell Berry
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The earth is what we all have in common.
Wendell Berry