Quotes from Wendell Berry

I know by now that the love of ghosts is not expectant, and I am coming to that. This Virgie of mine, this new found Virge, is the last care of my life, and I know the ignorance I must cherish him in. I must care for him as I care for a wildflower or a singing bird, no terms, no expectation, as finally I care for Port William and the ones who have been here with me. I want to leave here openhanded, with only the ancient blessing, 'Good-bye. My love to you all.

What can't be helped must be endured.

The strangest of all the doctrines of the cult of competition, in which admittedly there must be losers as well as winners, is that the result of competition is inevitably good for everybody, that altruistic ends may be met by a system without altruistic motives or altruistic means.

But this is not the story of a life. It is the story of lives, knit together, overlapping in succession, rising again from grave after grave.

We live the given life, and not the planned. - 1994 III

I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration.

With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe.

Another decent possibility my critics implicitly deny is that of work as a gift…They assume—and this is the orthodox assumption of the industrial economy—that the only help worth giving is not given at all, but sold. Love, friendship, neighbourliness, compassion, duty—what are they?

What is the point of labor saving if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health? (Health is Membership, pg. 93)

She thought the human condition was a calculated insult to her personally, the fault of certain people in particular. If she wasn't the president of the United States, or Mrs. Rockefeller, or at least happy, it was somebody else's fault, not hers. Her stinger was always out.

Woods I part the out thrusting branches and come in beneath the blessed and the blessing trees. Though I am silent there is singing around me. Though I am dark there is vision around me. Though I am heavy there is flight around me.

Some days, sitting here on my porch over the river, my memory seems to enclose me entirely; I wander back in my reckoning among all of my own that have lived and died until I no longer remember where I am. And then I lift my head and look about me at the river and the valley, the great, unearned beauty of this place, and I feel the memoryless joy of a man just risen from the grave.

Our Children no longer learn how to read the great book of Nature from their own direct experience, or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water come from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.

She mourns for the future, as the past has taught her. And yet there is a rejoicing in her, persistent and unbidden as the beating of her heart.

What I am sure of is that we have lost the old apprehension of Nature as a being accessible to imagination, linking Heaven and Earth, making and informing the incarnate creation, and requiring of humanity an obedience at once worshipful, ethical, and economic.

He stands under them, looks up, sees, knows, and knows that he does not know.

The modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing that cannot be proved, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.

The first principle of the exploitive mind is to divide and conquer. And surely there has never been a people more ominously and painfully divided than we are—both against each other and within ourselves. Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship. Its stock in trade in politics is to sell despotism and avarice as freedom and democracy.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings

Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture. (Health Is Membership, pg. 98)

This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.

There should be no relenting in our efforts to influence politics and politicians. But in the name of honesty and sanity we must recognize the limits of politics.

You have taken me and quieted me. You have been such light to me that others have been your shadows. You come near me with the nearness of sleep. --Marriage, Wendell Berry

His home is the emblem of his status, but it is not the center of his interest or of his consciousness. The history of our time has been to a considerable extent the movement of the center of consciousness away from home.