Quote

When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.

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
Walk
Barn
Stay
Barns
Walks
Lamb
Help
Lambs
Helping
Raising
Best
Nurse
Thing
Sheep
Impulse

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
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Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.
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In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.
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At home the great delight is to see the clover and grass now growing on places that were bare when we came. These small healings of the ground are my model accomplishment-everything else I do must aspire to that. While I was at that work the world gained with every move I made, and I harmed nothing.
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What I stand for is what I stand on.
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For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land.
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If you grow a garden you are going to shed some sweat, and you are going to spend some time bent over you will experience some aches and pains. But it is in the willingness to accept this discomfort that we strike the most telling blow against the power plants and what they represent.
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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.
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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.
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The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.
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The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
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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.
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You cannot save the land apart from the people, or the people apart from the land.
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Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.
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Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call the economy or the free market is less and less distinguishable from warfare.
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