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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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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Shapes
Lose
Tree
Loses
History
Thought
Way
Like
Distinction

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.
Wendell Berry
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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
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Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.
Wendell Berry
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The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.
Wendell Berry
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Under the pavement the dirt is dreaming of grass.
Wendell Berry
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Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents.
Wendell Berry
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We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
Wendell Berry
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In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.
Wendell Berry
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We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.
Wendell Berry
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A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.
Wendell Berry
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If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.
Wendell Berry
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When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.
Wendell Berry
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Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.
Wendell Berry
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Thinking is the most overrated human activity.
Wendell Berry
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We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.
Wendell Berry
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The law is meant to work for justice. But people who know themselves know that, at some point, justice had better be mitigated by mercy. And you don't get to mercy by a legal principle. You get to mercy by way of imagination, sympathy, tenderness of heart - which are not weaknesses.
Wendell Berry
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The earth is what we all have in common.
Wendell Berry
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The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
Wendell Berry