Quote

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

Wendell Berry

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Mourn
Speech
Lives
Death
World
Sings

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
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
Image
An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
Wendell Berry
Image
They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself. What they didn’t see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.
Wendell Berry
Image
To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
Wendell Berry
Image
Geese appear high over us, / pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, / as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear / in the ancient faith: what we need / is here. And we pray, not / for new earth or heaven, but to be / quiet in heart, and in eye, / clear. What we need is here.
Wendell Berry
Image
In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.
Wendell Berry
Image
It's mighty hard right now to think of anything that's precious that isn't endangered. There are no sacred and unsacred places there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
Wendell Berry
Image
We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being humans not by trying to be gods.
Wendell Berry
Image
It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.
Wendell Berry
Image
Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.
Wendell Berry
Image
The earth is what we all have in common.
Wendell Berry
Image
Willing to die you give up your will keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move.
Wendell Berry
Image
To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.
Wendell Berry
Image
There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.
Wendell Berry
Image
How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.
Wendell Berry
Image
The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.
Wendell Berry
Image
Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.
Wendell Berry
Image
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.
Wendell Berry
Image
Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.
Wendell Berry
Image
We are living even now among punishments and ruins.
Wendell Berry