Quotes from Wendell Berry

An infinitely greedy sovereign is afoot in the universe, staking his claims.

Wendell Berry's formula for a good life and a good community is simple and pleasingly unoriginal. Slow down. Pay attention. Do good work. Love your neighbours. Love your place. Stay in your place. Settle for less, enjoy it more.

Whatever is singing is found, awaiting the return of whatever is lost.

When the mind's an empty room The clear days come.

Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money—a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One's

He went through the old motions of his life, taking care of what needed caring for, keeping mostly quiet about what was on his mind. But his hard waiting changed him; you could see it in his face.

But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

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.

Any abundance, in any amount, is illusory if it does not safeguard its producers.

The worst temptation of religious people has always been to publish and punish the sins of (other) sinners in this world, with no patience or deference for the judgment of God.

We younger ones began to see that we knew things that never had not been known.

An education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries.

The preserver of abundance is excellence.

Do we, for instance, carry on our work in our nest or do we only reside and get our mail there? Is our nest a place of consumption only or is it also a place of production?

Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark.

It seemed to us that we'd never thought of him before as a man who would die. He never had thought of himself in that way. Until that year, although he'd cursed his weakness and his age, he'd either ignored the idea of his death or had refused to believe in it. He'd only thought of himself as living.

Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me.

For if there was any kindness in slavery it was dependent on the docility of the slaves; any slave who was unwilling to be a slave broke through the myth of paternalism and benevolence, and brought down on himself the violence inherent in the system. A

You think the winter will never end, and then, when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light.

The approach of a man's life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive.

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation./He went flying down the river in his boat/with his video camera to his eye, making/a moving picture of the moving river/...[At the end of his vacation,]/With a flick of the switch, there it would be./But he would not be in it. He would never be in it.

Most people now are looking for a better place, which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no "better place" than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into it like leaves in the autumn.

The tractor's arrival had signaled, among other things, agriculture's shift from an almost exclusive dependence on free solar energy to a total dependence on costly fossil fuel.