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Time Quotes by Wendell Berry

71 Time quotes by Wendell Berry

All Time quotes Wendell Berry’s page

Wendell Berry describes time as a gentle mercy that never stops. He says that only the present truly matters, and that our hearts can be generous in each fleeting moment. He also notes that when we write about past memories they quickly turn into story‑like fiction.

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“Satisfaction rises out of the flow of time.”

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“If you don't know where you're from, you'll have a hard time saying where you're going.”

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To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.

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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

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I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes…

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Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.

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“We had, you could say, everything but money -- Grandmam and I did, anyhow. We had each other and our work, and…

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It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not…

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“This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur…

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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,…

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“She mourns for the future, as the past has taught her. And yet there is a rejoicing in her, persistent and unbidden…

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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…

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Action can only be understood in relation to place; only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in…

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This, I thought, is what is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and…

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You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see,…

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“The world doesn't stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when…

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“But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for…

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Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately…

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But we can do nothing for the human future that we will not do for the human present. For the amelioration of…

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“There is time, and then there is timelessness. And if you're lucky, and if you can be still enough, observant enough, you…

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If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see…

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“I lost no time, of course, in telling him about the book I wanted to write. Not, by then, to my surprise,…

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“It is possible, as I have learned again and again, to be in one’s place, in such company, wild or domestic, and…

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“I could not have desired her enough. She was a living soul and could be loved forever. Like every living creature, she…

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If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly…

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“Back there in the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early…

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“Here on the river I have known peace and beauty such as I never knew in any other place. There is always…

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New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself,…

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“Over a long time, the coming and passing of several generations, the old farm had settled into its patterns and cycles of…

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“You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There…

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“Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken by as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately…

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“Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition.…

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“You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can't…

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“Christ did not descend from the cross except into the grave. And why not otherwise? Wouldn’t it have put fine comical expressions…

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“To both the racist and the puritan, childhood is not a time of life that we grow out of, as the life…

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“What marriage offers - and what fidelity is meant to protect - is the possibility of moments when what we have chosen…

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The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it.…

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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…

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It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.

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More by Wendell Berry

During the last 17 years... I have been working at the restoration of a once exhausted hillside. Its scars are now healed over, though…

Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst, we…

To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a…

“The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship and then in mariage. My grandfather made…

The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't.…

“I knew a man who, in the age of chain-saws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was…

“The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as "the environment" -- that is, what surrounds us, we have already made a profound…

A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define…

“That we can prescribe the terms of our own success, that we can live outside or in ignorance of the Great Economy are the…

“The mind that comes to rest is tended In ways that it cannot intend: Is borne, preserved, and comprehended By what it cannot comprehend.…

The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.

The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.

I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it…

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean…