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"However interesting and lovely my days were, I could get from one day to the next only by passing through a night. I have, it is true, known lovely nights here; nights of sound sleep and good dreams and nights made wakeful by happy thoughts. but I have not always been a good sleeper, and my thoughts at night have sometimes been far from happy."
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Exlpore more Reflection quotes
"Solitude is a wonderful treasure the world is still yet to discover."
"There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past. I wasn't sure I had it in me to keep looking back."
"You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else."
"How much had I missed in these months of despair and numbness?"
"The air is cold and dusk has descended. In the distance lightning flickers and a far away rumble of thunder awakens my thoughts and makes me remember."
"Instead of the church in Africa to be a place for eradicating darkness by beaming out light, she has unfortunately become the den of robbers as Jesus put it."
"Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
"I don't dream. Come to think of it, i haven't had any dreams in a long time."
"You don't have to be in hurry in life."
"I had begun to feel that life was a repetition of the same thing; that there was nothing new either in me or in him; and that, on the contrary, we kept going back as it were on what was old."
Explore more quotes by Wendell Berry
"Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don't know and have compassion for them at the same time?"
"As I age in the world it will rise and spread,and be for this place horizonand orison, the voice of its winds.I have made myself a dream to dreamof its rising, that has gentled my nights.Let me desire and wish well the lifethese trees may live when Ino longer rise in the morningsto be pleased with the green of themshining, and their shadows on the ground, and the sound of the wind in them."
"I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
"Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do."
"We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation."
"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."
"Back there in the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time."
"The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it."
"We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?"
"We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity."
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