Wendell Berry Quotes
It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
Berry, Wendell. Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. Counterpoint, 2000, p. 81.
Jackie Kennedy used this quotation in the last letter she wrote from the White House. It was to Khrushchev.
{627488} is an earlier quotation by a French Diplomat of very similar sentiment, but it is not known if Stalin had ever seen it. Also See Beilby Porteus {627489} for an 18th century variation. This is a puzzling phenomenon. In the United States if there is a plane crash and a hundred people are killed, it is page one and television lead news. But between 40,000 and 50,000 Americans die each year, one or two at a time in auto crashes, and it does not seem to be news. More American college students commit suicide (about 1200 a year) then are killed in mining or other industrial accidents, but the former we rarely hear about.
Federal Authorities arrived with press officers and a bevy of reporters and issued statements to the press while there were thousands of people in dire straits with many of them dying with no food, medical care or relocation from flooding water.
Wendell Erdman Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
