Quote

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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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Terms
Strictly
Subjects
Alien
Insist
Strange
Threatening
Term
Fearful
Long
Aliens
Wilderness
Subject
Relating

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A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.
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You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
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There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.
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Education in the true sense, of course, is an enablement to serve-both the living human community in its natural household or neighborhood and the precious cultural possessions that the living community inherits or should inherit.
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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.
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...And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.
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Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.
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To accept that there is nothing to do is to despair. It is to become in some fundamental way less than human. Those of us who are protesting are protesting in part for our own sake to keep ourselves whole as human beings.
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We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.
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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.
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Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.
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It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.
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Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.
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It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
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I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.
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In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.
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People talk about job creation, as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.
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There are no unsacred places there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
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To me, an economy that sees the life of a community or a place as expendable, and reckons its value only in terms of money, is not acceptable because it is not realistic. I am thinking as I believe we must think if we wish to discuss the best uses of people, places, and things, and if we wish to give affection some standing in our thoughts.
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The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
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