Quote

There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.

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
Layers
Ground
Sitting
Worth
Littles
Little
Nothing
Topsoil
Layer

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
Wendell Berry
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Eating is an agricultural act.
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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Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time.
Wendell Berry
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Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
Wendell Berry
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Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible... Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, what will this do to our community? tends toward the right answer for the world.
Wendell Berry
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We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.
Wendell Berry
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The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.
Wendell Berry
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It surely is far better to be disliked by somebody you don't love than by somebody you do. Even so, I mind. Even so, failing to love somebody is a failure.
Wendell Berry
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Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.
Wendell Berry
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What can't be helped must be endured.
Wendell Berry
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You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.
Wendell Berry
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We are now, measurably, reducing the availability of these life-supporting goods which we can think of (though only on the conditions of good health and good care) as self-renewing or sustainable. We are also destroying rapidly the supplies of the fossil fuels, which are limited and not renewable, and on which we have become totally dependent.
Wendell Berry
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One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the gospels without feeling that something is amiss.
Wendell Berry
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There's a world of difference . . . between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.
Wendell Berry
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We clasp the hands of those who go before us.
Wendell Berry
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The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
Wendell Berry
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There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.
Wendell Berry
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Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry