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Portrait of Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry

(1934) Author United States

847 quotes in 2542 categories

Wendell Berry’s reverence for land and community unfolds in eight hundred forty‑seven reflections, each urging a slower, more mindful connection to the earth and to one another.

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Wendell Berry is an author from the United States, best known for The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

Quick Facts About Wendell Berry

Born: August 5, 1934
Nationality: United States
Profession: Author
Notable works: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

About Wendell Berry

Wendell Erdman Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of The Gift of Good Land (1981) and The Unsettling of America (1977). His attention to the culture and economy of rural communities is also found in the novels and stories of Port William, such as A Place on Earth (1967), Jayber Crow (2000), and That Distant Land (2004).

Biography source: Wikipedia

Awards & Honors

Thomas Merton Award Poets' Prize Guggenheim Fellowship National Humanities Medal Helmerich Award Jefferson Lecture Four Freedoms Award – Freedom Medal Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award

Quotes by Wendell Berry

“The river's injury is its shape.”

Injury

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What can't be helped must be endured.

Endured

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Why I am NOT going to buy a computer

Computer

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What I stand for is what I stand on.

Inspirational

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Invest in the millenium.

Invest

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It's the impeded stream that sings

Inspirational

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“The Carpenter Shop”

Carpenter

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Love changes, and in change is true.

Change

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“I never again would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away.”

Carry

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“All good human work remembers its history.”

Good human

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“The world had become pretty generally Ceceliafied.”

Generally

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A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.

Computers

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Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

Upstream

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We clasp the hands of those who go before us.

Hands

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“The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge.”

Knowledge

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The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.

Lasted

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“I had changed, and the sign of it was only that my own death seemed to me by far the least important…

Changed

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“Ths visions of the mind have a debt to reality that it is hard to get the mind to pay when it…

Dreams

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We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.

Concerned

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“You think the winter will never end, and then, when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes…

Flower

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“The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. (pg. 260, The Idea of a Local Economy)”

Charity

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The securest guarantee of the long-term good health of both farmland and city is, I believe, locally produced food.

Believe

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How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

Enough

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“The world has room for many people who are content to live as humans, but only for a relative few intent upon…

Giants

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What would be the point of being personally whole in a dismembered society, or personally healthy in a land scalped, eroded and…

Controlled

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It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to…

Computers

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“All women is brothers,' Burley Coulter used to say, and then look at you with a dead sober look as if he…

Americana

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“Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful…

Marriage

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If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe…

Connected

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“the inlet our friend looks as he did when we first knew him, and until I wake I believe I will die…

Death

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“I now suspect that if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we…

Computers

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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…

Death and dying

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“There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization,…

Dreams

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“the greatest destroyer of the small economies of small farms has been the doctrine of sanitation. I have no argument against cleanliness…

Sanitation Argument

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“Let me outline briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a…

Ecology

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“It is not, I think, a question of when and how the white people will "free" the black and the red people.…

First time

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“No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home…

Community

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The Captains of Industry have always counseled the rest of us "to be realistic." Let us, therefore, be realistic. Is it realistic…

Air

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

Free enterprise

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“God loves Port William as it is... Why else should He want it to be better than it is? All my life…

Everlasting life

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Wendell Berry by topic

Life (105) Nature (90) World (82) Love (79) Time (71) People (66) Economy (49) Community (46) Ifs (44) Land (42) Thinking (40) Humans (40) Economics (39) Inspirational (38) Psychology (37) Religion (35) May (33) Earth (33) Way (32) Food (32) Environmental (32) Agriculture (32) Needs (31) Knows (31) Death (31)