Quotes from Wendell Berry

There appears to be a law that when creatures have reached the level of consciousness, as men have, they must become conscious of the creation; they must learn how they fit into it and what its needs are and what it requires of them, or else pay a terrible penalty: the spirit of the creation will go out of them, and they will become destructive; the very earth will depart from them and go where they cannot follow.

The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.

Out of context," as Wes Jackson has said, "the best minds do the worst damage.

Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thought and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, and grieve with a sisterly grief over Grandmam and Mrs. Feltner and the other old women who have gone before. Finally, as a gift, as a mercy, I remember to pray, 'Thy will be done,' and then again I am free and can go to sleep.

Love in this world doesn't come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all. But it consoled me in a way too; I could see that if I got them all read and had no more surprises in that line, I would have been sorry.

Sometimes I fall back pretty hard on the butterflies and the flowers. What a privilege to have been around for this.

People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.

Well, honey, everybody has to die sometime.

A computer destroys the sense of historical succession, just as do other forms of mechanization...Certain farms contain hospitably the remnants and reminders of the forest or prairie that preceded them. It is possible even for towns and cities to remember farms and forests or prairies. All good human work remembers its history.

Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it?

Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love.

The ability to be good is not the ability to do nothing. It is not negative or passive. It is the ability to do something well--to do good work for good reasons. In order to be good you have to know how--and this knowing is vast, complex, humble and humbling; it is of the mind and of the hands, of neither alone.

And yet love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark.

Modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. Wendell Berry

Ths visions of the mind have a debt to reality that it is hard to get the mind to pay when it is under the influence of its visions.

But he learned what he had to, and he changed, and so he made himself exceptional.

Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you'd left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth.

Scared for health, afraid of death, bored, dissatisfied, vengeful, greedy, ignorant, and gullible—these are the qualities of the ideal consumer. Can we imagine a way of education that would turn passive consumers into active and informed critics, capable of using their own minds in their own defense?

I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever. Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?

We all come from divorce. This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can't put it all back together again. What you can do, is the only thing that you can do. You take two things that ought to be together and you put them together. Two things! Not all things.

You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says. By such signs you can tell, for instance, what he thinks of his wife . . .

What the government will or will not do is finally beside the point. If people do not have the government they want, then they will have a government that they must either change or endure. Finally

I have books to read, and much to sit and watch. I try not to let good things go by unnoticed.