Quote

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.

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
Land
Resource
Use
Agriculture
Come
Coal
Life
Damage
Like
Soil
Determination
Resources
Present
Damages

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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?
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Don't pray for the rain to stop pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.
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The more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word ‘natural’ becomes a term of value.
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It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.
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The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
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And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.
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Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.
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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.
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When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.
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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.
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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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The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
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The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.
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We are alive within mystery, by miracle... We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say.
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So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.
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This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.
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Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
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I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.
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Invest in the millenium.
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Our Children no longer learn how to read the great book of Nature from their own direct experience, or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water come from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.
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