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If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.

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
Serve
Disintegrates
Endures
Sustainability
Destroys
Environmental
Endure

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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I hear from readers a good deal, and I try to answer every letter. I think, because of my commitment to issues of conservation and good agriculture and peaceableness, they find something hopeful in my work.
Wendell Berry
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THE WILD ROSE” – BY WENDELL BERRY Sometimes, hidden from me in daily custom and in ritual I live by you unaware, as if by the beating of my heart. Suddenly you flare again in my sight A wild rose at the edge of the thicket where yesterday there was only shade And I am blessed and choose again, That which I chose before.
Wendell Berry
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The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.
Wendell Berry
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...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.
Wendell Berry
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You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.
Wendell Berry
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Battle with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life stay away from screens.
Wendell Berry
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If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.
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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You can't be a critic by simply being a griper. One has also to search out the examples of good work.
Wendell Berry
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But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation. For in these days, Caesar is no longer a mere destroyer of armies, cities, and nations. He is a contradicter of the fundamental miracle of life.
Wendell Berry
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Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
Wendell Berry
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I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.
Wendell Berry
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The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.
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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I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.
Wendell Berry
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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
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You cannot save the land apart from the people, or the people apart from the land.
Wendell Berry
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Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
Wendell Berry
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Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
Wendell Berry
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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