Quotes from Wendell Berry

turning away from the house, from the losses and failures and confinements of his history, to the land, the woods and fields of the old farm, in which he already sensed an endlessly abounding and unfolding promise.

Look in and see him looking out. He is not always quiet, but there have been times when happiness has come to him, unasked, like the stillness on the water that holds the evening clear while it subsides - and he let go what he was not.

You'd have to stand twice in the same place to make a shadow.

I have this love for Mattie. 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 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 for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.

Teaching as a purpose, as such, is difficult to prescribe or talk about because the thing it is proposing to make is usually something so vague as "understanding.

New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure. "What can't be helped must be endured," Mat Feltner said. And he was a man who knew.

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling

If we removed the status and compensation from the destructive exploits we classify as "manly," men would be found to be suffering as much as women. They would be found to be suffering for the same reason: they are in exile from the communion of men and women, which is their deepest connection with the communion of all creatures.

The difference between me and Mr. and Mrs. Feltner, as I had to see and feel even in my own grief, was that they were old and I was young. I was filled with life, with my life and Virgil's life, with the life of our baby, and with other lives that might, in time, come to me. But the Feltners had begun to be old. Life had quit coming to them, and was going away.

All through that bad time, when Virgil's absence was wearing into us, when "missing" kept renaming itself more and more insistently as "dead" and "lost forever," I was yet grateful. Sometimes I was grateful because I knew I ought to be, sometimes because I wanted to be, and sometimes a sweet thankfulness came to me on its own, like a singing from somewhere out in the dark.

strewn with wildflowers and overhead were making shade. Everybody was busy about the fields and plant beds and gardens. The season had made its claim. And then there came a day of brittle-feeling showers driven over the town by a cold wind that, after the warm days, seemed to come through your clothes in slices.

Because I have never separated myself from my home neighborhood, I cannot identify myself to myself apart from it. I am fairly literally flesh of its flesh. It is present in me, and to me, wherever I go. This

you're too pretty for your own good, maybe. It could get you an early start on a miserable life.

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate "relationship" involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended.

I had begun my time of waiting. I was living my life, and yet I seemed somehow to be outside of it, as if only when the war was over and Virgil came home would I be able to come back into my life and live again inside it.

I believe in American political principles, and I will not sit idly by and see those principles destroyed by sorry practice. I am ashamed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles.

And then Andy told him about Meikelberger's farm. Had Isaac ever thought of buying more land – say, a neighbor's farm? Well, if I did I've have to go in debt to buy it, and to farm it. It would be more time and help than I've got. And I'd lose my neighbor. You'd rather have your neighbor? We're supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves. We try. If you need them, it helps.

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate "relationship" involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.

We'd been living at Grandpa's for a little more than a year when Mrs. Crandel died. And the next day Kate Helen Branch had a baby. Uncle Burley said that was just the way things were. They put one in and pull another one out.

Behind us the walls of the house were dark; the lighted windows shone as if they were floating and might twist or slant or change places.

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

we think it ordinary to spend twelve or sixteen or twenty years of a person's life and many thousands of public dollars on "education" —and not a dime or a thought on character.

Communists and capitalists alike, liberal and conservative capitalists alike, have needed to replace religion with some form of determinism, so that they can say to their victims, I am doing this because I can't do otherwise. It is not my fault. It is inevitable. The wonder is how often organized religion has gone along with this lie.

People are making careful, comely, dignified work of the essential tasks defined by modern values as "drudgery." And because they have thought of the well-being of all the people, all are busy. There is a use for everyone. The Amish do not have the abandoned children, cast-off old people, criminals, indigents, and vagrants whom we have "freed from drudgery." And