Quotes from Wendell Berry

Living right on called for nothing out of the ordinary. We made no changes. We only accepted the changes as they came.

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation... In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

When you have gone too far, as I think he did, the only mending is to come home.

Dance,' they told me, and I stood still, and while I stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced. 'Pray,' they said, and I laughed, covering myself in the earth's brightnesses, and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.

But thinking of Mattie's marriage, I saw too how a marriage, in bringing two people into each other's presence, must include loneliness and error. I imagined a moment when the husband and wife realize that their marriage includes their faults, that they do not perfect each other, and that in making their marriage they also fail it and must carry to the grave things they cannot give away.

For agrarians, the correct response is to stand confidently on our fundamental premise, which is both democratic and ecological: the land is a gift of immeasurable value. If it is a gift, then it is a gift to all the living in all time. To withhold it from some is finally to destroy it for all. For a few powerful people to own or control it all, or decide its fate, is wrong.

He wasn't much of a listener, not a great payer of attention to things outside his head.

All good human work remembers its history.

I finally knew, I told him, why Christ's prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh. He was one of us. Once He had become mortal, He could not become immortal except by dying. That He prayed that prayer at all showed how human He was. That He knew it could not be granted showed His divinity; that He prayed it anyhow showed His mortality, His mortal love of life that His death made immortal.

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.

There is much good work to be done by every one of us and we must begin to do it.

If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.

Our model citizen is a sophisticate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato

O]ne can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality.

It may be that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Why must the gate be narrow? Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened. To come in among these trees you must leave behind the six days' world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes. You must come without weapon or tool, alone, expecting nothing, remembering nothing, into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.

I knew what he was doing. He was walking away from his thoughts but his thoughts were staying with him.

Be thankful and repay Growth with good work and care. Work done in gratitude Kindly, and well, is prayer.

He was all show, and he had the conviction, as such people do, that show is the same as substance. He didn't think he was fooling other people; he had fooled himself.

The world has room for many people who are content to live as humans, but only for a relative few intent upon living as giants or as gods.

The river's injury is its shape.

Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night. Order is only the possibility of rest.