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Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.

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
Sings
Mourn
Speech
Lives
Death
World

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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The country where he lives is haunted by the ghost of an old forest. In the cleared fields where he gardens and pastures his horses it stood once, and will return. There will be a resurrection of the wild. Already it stands in wait at the pasture fences.
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
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I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.
Wendell Berry
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Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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As long as we insist on relating to it strictly on our own terms-as strange to us or subject to us-the wilderness is alien, threatening, fearful.
Wendell Berry
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You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
Wendell Berry
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I believe in thrift as I believe in freedom, but I don't support the plutocratic hostility to taxation, regulation, and protections of land, water, and air.
Wendell Berry
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Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.
Wendell Berry
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The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.
Wendell Berry
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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
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In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.
Wendell Berry
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An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.
Wendell Berry
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If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?
Wendell Berry
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Today, local economies are being destroyed by the 'pluralistic,' displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.
Wendell Berry
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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
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Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Wendell Berry
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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
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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.
Wendell Berry
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If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.
Wendell Berry