Warncke Berry Quotes

When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind. ~ Wendell Berry

Like a soldier back from battle you fill my vision. You're a flood, a baptism I'd forgotten, and the force of you leaves me breathless. ~ Julie Berry

I'm like a backward berry, Unripened on the vine, For all my friends are fifty, And I'm only forty-nine. ~ Ogden Nash

But he learned what he had to, and he changed, and so he made himself exceptional. ~ Wendell Berry

The modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing that cannot be proved, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell ... The next hard time is just as real to him as the last, and so is the next blessing. The new ignorance is the same as the old, only less aware that ignorance is the same as the old, only less aware that ignorance is what it is. It is less humble, more foolish and frivolous, more dangerous. A man, Old Jack thinks, has no choice but to be ignorant, but he does not have to be a fool. He can know his place, and he can stay in it and be faithful. ~ Wendell Berry

I'm really proud of myself because I've pared my beauty regimen down to a cream blush and berry-tinted lip balm, which has saved me so much time. ~ Katherine Heigl

An uninhibited, Chuck Berry devotee but experimented with and broke a lot of ground on feedback techniques and solid variations in tonal and dissonant utilizations. I'm one of the best guitarists in the world, and I play with great emotion. ~ Ted Nugent

I came to feel a tenderness for them all. This was something new to me. It gave me a curious pleasure to touch them, to help them in and out of the chair, to shave their weather-toughened old faces. They had known hard use, nearly all of them. You could tell it by the way they held themselves and moved. Most of all you could tell it by their hands, which were shaped by wear and often by the twists and swellings of arthritis. They had used their hands forgetfully, as hooks and pliers and hammers, and in every kind of weather. The backs of their hands showed a network of little scars where they had been cut, nicked, thornstuck, pinched, punctured, scraped, and burned. Their faces told that they had suffered things they did not talk about.Every one of them had a good knife in his pocket, sharp, the blades whetted narrow and concave, the horn of the handle worn smooth. ~ Wendell Berry

But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer's anxiety that he is missing out on what is "in." In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand. ~ Wendell Berry

If you eat, you are involved in agriculture. ~ Wendell Berry

And finally there was the sleepless night
when i decided to explore and fight
the foul, the inadmissible abyss,
devoting all my twisted life to this
one task. today i'm sixty-one. waxwings
are berry-pecking. a cicada sings. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The preserver of abundance is excellence. ~ Wendell Berry

don't start no sh wont be no it ~ Bertice Berry

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence. ~ Steve Berry

My ding-a-ling, my ding-a-ling, won't you play with my ding-a-ling. ~ Chuck Berry

Wendell Berry in "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer." "I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work." Ethan ~ Mark Sundeen

You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says. ~ Wendell Berry

How did one nation produce both humble souls and killers? ~ Julie Berry

To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know. ~ Wendell Berry

We must, however, reflect on what is happening. It is an urgent matter, especially for those of us who still live in a meaningful, even a numinous, earth community. We have not spoken. Nor even have we seen clearly what is happening. The issue goes far beyond economics, or commerce, or poetics, or an evening of pleasantries as we look out over a scenic view. Something is happening beyond all this. We are losing splendind and intimate modes of divine presence. We are, perhaps, losing ourselves. ~ Thomas Berry

It is, then, not simply a question of black power or white power, but of how meaningfully to reenfranchise human power. This, as I think Martin Luther King understood, is the real point, the real gift to America, of the struggle of the black people. In accepting the humanity of the black race, the white people will not be giving accommodation to an alien people; it will be receiving into itself half of its own experience, vital and indispensable to it, which it has so far denied at great cost. ~ Wendell Berry

you can apologize, but don't ever be sorry! ~ Bertice Berry

The man for me is the cherry on the pie. But I'm the pie and my pie is good all by itself. Even if I don't have a cherry. ~ Halle Berry

Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest. ~ Wendell Berry

WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so. ~ Wendell Berry

I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn't paint. ~ Chuck Berry

If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk. ~ Wendell Berry

That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil-that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat-may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true. ~ Wendell Berry

I always had to prove myself through my actions. Be a cheerleader. Be class president. Be the editor of the newspaper. ~ Halle Berry

Whatever's most important to you is your god. If it's not the Rock Christ Jesus, then it's sand! ~ Raymond Berry

truth only comes when you're ready to face it! ~ Bertice Berry

I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want. ~ Wendell Berry

We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and for each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make. The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependant on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do. ~ Wendell Berry

When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words. ~ Wendell Berry

The best musicians in the world were raised on the same kind of music I was raised on and that is black, soulful, authoritative, ultra-tight, ferocious, uppity, defiant music that from the Howlin' Wolf, the Muddy Waters, the Lightnin' Hopkins, the Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard. ~ Ted Nugent

A good idea plus capable men cannot fail; it is better than money in the bank. ~ John Berry