Quote

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One's inner voices become audible... In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.

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
Lives
Obligation
Found
Wild
True
Clearly
Become
Solitude
Human
Consequence
Humans
Inner
Audible
Without
Places
Responds
Voice
Voices

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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We live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory.
Wendell Berry
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I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
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The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.
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...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.
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Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred.
Wendell Berry
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We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.
Wendell Berry
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Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.
Wendell Berry
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Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.
Wendell Berry
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Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.
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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Eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as 'consumers.'
Wendell Berry
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Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
Wendell Berry
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But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time...of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here...It is in the world, but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.
Wendell Berry
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Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.
Wendell Berry
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You can't live entirely alone. You have to have some kind of a support system.
Wendell Berry
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We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.
Wendell Berry
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The industrial mind is a mind without compunction it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. (A Defense of the Family Farm, 1986)
Wendell Berry
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The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.
Wendell Berry