Quotes from Wendell Berry

The interaction, the interdependence, of life and death, which in nature is the source of an inexhaustible fecundity, is the basis of a set of analogies, to which agriculture and the rest of the human economy must conform in order to endure, and which is ultimately religious....

One must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.

There is time, and then there is timelessness. And if you're lucky, and if you can be still enough, observant enough, you may be able to know and speak about that intersection of time and timelessness, or time and eternity.

There is such a thing as lovesickness for good horses and mules, and for this there is no cure. People who operate machines know nothing like it. This creaturely love can keep one interested all day long in every motion of a good team or a good saddle horse. And not only all day long, but all year round and all life long.

joy teaches him to rise, to stand and move out through the opening the light has made. He stands on the green hilltop amid the cedars, the skewed stones, the earth all opened doors… Sabbaths 2001 I

marriage is the earthly form of love that gives love its place and work and provides for the good care of both bodies and souls. ... Marriage takes love out of the mind and places it responsibly in the world. (Poetry and Marriage)

He has come into a wakefulness as quiet as sleep.

If I could have found in my mind a plain and simple way to be right, that would have been something. I would have been changed in another way, and my life ever afterward would have been different. But having reached the crisis—the crossroad, so to speak—I failed. I didn't have at all the feeling of being right.

Unlike the history of great events, the history of families and small places forces us to recognize the past as a shadow from which shadowy figures now and then emerge into the light, take on briefly the substance of a story, a part of a story, a few imaginable details, and merge again into the shadow.

I am ashamed and deeply distressed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles.

If you talk a good line without being changed by what you say, then you are not just hypocritical and doomed; you have become an agent of the disease.

a woman in a tailored suit is sitting with a legal pad on her lap. . . . The businesswoman is austerely tailored and coiffured; her eye-glasses are severe. . . . her taste and bearing are splendid. She is impeccable.

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 to go, we have begun our journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here.

The Carpenter Shop

the difference between a small local business that must share the fate of the local community and a large absentee corporation that is set up to escape the fate of the local community by ruining the local community.

We stood and looked and knowed it was all the time we had and from now on we must remember. We must look now forever.

They were not going to live again in a time like that.

What men know and presume about the earth is part of it, passing always back into it, carried on by it into what they do not know. Even their abuses of it, their diminishments and dooms, belong to it.

Everything there seemed to belong where it was. That was why I went there.

As Walter Shewring rightly said, both "the plowman and the potter have a cosmic function." And bad art in any trade dishonors and damages Creation.

It just seemed that, as we waited together for the coming of this life, it had become wrong to sit apart.

Kindness is not a word much at home in current political and religious speech, but it is a rich word and a necessary one. There is good reason to think that we cannot live without it. Kind is obviously related to kin, but also to race and to nature. In the Middle Ages kind and nature were synonyms. Equal, in the famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence, could be well translated by these terms: All men are created kin, or of a kind, or of the same race or nature.