Quotes from Wendell Berry

I have this love for [him]. 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 own 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 own forever, and my love goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.

The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth.

it is pride that lies awake in the night with its desire and its grief.

T]he whole human population of the world cannot live on imported food. Some people some where are going to have to grow the food. And where ever food is grown the growing of it will raise the same two questions: How do you preserve the land in use? And how do you preserve the people who use the land? The farther the food is transported, the harder it will be to answer those questions correctly.

It just all of a sudden came over me, so that in one breath I was lost and a stranger, and in the next I was found.

There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.

We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.

It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.

No relationship can continue very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of these moments

A lifetime's knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it.

I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead.

Il ne nous suffit pas de comprendre nos obligations à l'égard des autres et de la terre; nous devons aussi les ressentir.

The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, even about the you children being gone, but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: 'Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.

All the episodes from my stories and novels are not about food only, but about meals. You can eat food by yourself. A meal, according to my understanding anyhow, is a communal event, bringing together family members, neighbors, even strangers. At its most ordinary, it involves hospitality, giving, receiving, and gratitude.

I now suspect that if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we work with living creatures the world will appear to us as a living creature.

Theoretically, there is always a better place for a person to live, better work to do, a better spouse to wed, better friends to have. But then this person must meet herself coming beck. Theoretically, there always is a better inhabitant of this place, a better member of this community, a better worker, spouse, and friend than she is. This surely describes one of the circles of Hell, and who hasn't traveled around it a time or two?

It was no thought or word that called culture into being, but a tool or a weapon. After the stone axe we needed song and story to remember innocence, to record effect- and so to describe the limits, to say what can be done without damage.

A nuclear reactor is a proposed solution to the energy problem. But like all big-technological solutions, this one solves a single problem by causing many... A garden, on the other hand, is a solution that leads to other solutions. It is a part of the limitless pattern of good health and good sense.

the inlet our friend looks as he did when we first knew him, and until I wake I believe I will die of grief, for I know that this boy grew into a man who was a faithful friend who died.

I knew a man who, in the age of chain-saws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.

You see, we don't have enough sense to make these decisions. Somehow, you just get led to where you're supposed to be, if you're willing to submit.

But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won't live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines.

After more darkness and silence, I said, "Well, do you believe in the informed decision?" More darkness and silence. "No!" I envy his certainty! He understood that a determined life had its limits. "I had a wonderful life and I had nothing to do with it"—well, now I can say that, too. There is this sense of being on your own path.