Wendell Berry Quotes
I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished. It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever.
To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we "know" that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
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.
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.
The significance - and ultimately the quality - of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.
Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.
Marriage has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. (from "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine")
Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.
...the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.
Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse.
Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me.
Oh Lord, make us ableTo eat all that's on this table, And if there's some we haven't gotBring it to us while it's hot
Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when I am too old to work much and am mostly alone.
He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.
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.
Again I resume the longlesson: how small a thingcan be pleasing, how littlein this hard world it takesto satisfy the mindand bring it to its rest.
Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.
Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.
When I rise uplet me rise up joyfullike a bird.When I falllet me fall without regretlike a leaf.
The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.
The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
You think winter will never end, and then, when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light.
A tree forms itself in answerto its place and the light.Explain it how you will, the onlything explainable will beyour explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 IV
the inletour friend looks as he didwhen we first knew him, and until I wake I believeI will die of grief, for I knowthat this boy grew into a manwho was a faithful friendwho died.
Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. (pg. 260, The Idea of a Local Economy)
There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love.
We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved the most valuable evidence is immediately trumped by our inability to know what we have forgotten.
Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.
What is the point of "labor saving" if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health? (Health is Membership, pg. 93)
And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.
Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture. (Health Is Membership, pg. 98)
I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.
