Quotes from Wendell Berry

The world doesn't stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have only been on the edge of it.

To mind being disliked by a woman you don't desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.

I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my very own forever, and my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.

It was the kind of winter day that makes you forget that the weather was ever any different, and you feel like it has been winter all the way back to Adam.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children's education.

He loved the woods, where it seemed to him that every life was secret, including his own.

It surely is far better to be disliked by somebody you don't love than by somebody you do. Even so, I mind. Even so, failing to love somebody is a failure.

A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

All the world, as a matter of fact, is a mosaic of little places invisible to the powers that be. And in the eyes of the powers that be all these invisible places do not add up to a visible place. They add up to words and numbers.

Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed...

We depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see how even divine omnipotence might by the force of its own love be swayed down to the world? ...how it might, because it could know its own creatures only by compassion, put on mortal flesh, become a man, and walk among us, assume our nature and our fate, suffer our faults and our death?

We've all got to go through enough to kill us.

Jesus' military career has never compelled my belief.

Late in the night I pay the unrest I own to the life that has never lived and cannot live now. What the world could be is my good dream and my agony when, dreaming it, I lie awake and turn and look into the dark. I think of a luxury in the sturdiness and grace of necessary things, not in frivolity. That would heal the earth, and heal men. But the end, too, is part of the pattern, the last labor of the heart: to learn to lie still, one with the earth again, and let the world go.

We had, you could say, everything but money -- Grandmam and I did, anyhow. We had each other and our work, and not much time to think of what we didn't have.

One of the attractions of moving away into te life of employment, I think, is being disconnected and free, unbothered by membership. It is a life of beginnings without memories, but i is a life too that ends without being remembered.

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.

Education has increasingly been reduced to job training, preparing young people not for responsible adulthood and citizenship but for expert servitude to the corporations.

Through my history's despite and ruin, I have come to its remainder, and here have made the beginning of a farm intended to become my art of being here. By it I would instruct my wants: they should belong to each other and to this place. Until my song comes here to learn its words, my art is but the hope of song. (Part 2 from History is Clearing, p 174)

Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help.

So it is that the life force may take possession of a man-- so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.

This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since... I knew too that this new war was not even new but was only the old one come again. And what caused it? It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies.