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It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.
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
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Condemn
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Mad
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More quotes by Wendell Berry
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.
Wendell Berry
How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves
Wendell Berry
You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.
Wendell Berry
To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.
Wendell Berry
So it is that the life force may take possession of a man-- so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.
Wendell Berry
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.
Wendell Berry
I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.
Wendell Berry
It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.
Wendell Berry
The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.
Wendell Berry
We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.
Wendell Berry
It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.
Wendell Berry
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.
Wendell Berry
Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
Wendell Berry
Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.
Wendell Berry
The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day. I have loved it even in the rain. Sometimes I have loved it most in the rain.
Wendell Berry
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.
Wendell Berry
Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.
Wendell Berry
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
It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
Wendell Berry
Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma.
Wendell Berry
