Quotes from Wendell Berry

The conflicts of life and work, like those of rest and work, would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each. In practice, however they probably can be resolved (if that is the word) only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either or to sacrifice either to the other. But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary.

Mr. Feltner—who would not be "Mat" to me for a long time—turned to me and stuck out his hand. "Mr. Crow, I'm Mat Feltner. I'm glad to know you. I knew your mother's people. I remember the Daggets very well." There was nothing glancing or sidling about the way he looked at you. He looked right through your eyes, right into you, as a man looks at you who is willing for you to look right into him.

He pushes the doors open and calls the sheep, standing back out of the way as they come in and crowd to the troughs. He stays there a while, looking over the field, making sure that none has been left out. He feels growing in him now, in spite of all, a familiar and precious calm. The flock is in the barn, well fed, safe from dogs and the cold, warmly bedded. They will be there safe until morning. If not today, on most of the winter days of his life this completeness has filled his mind.

And so our reclamation project has been, for me, less a matter of idealism or morality than a kind of self-preservation. A destructive history, once it is understood as such, is a nearly insupportable burden. Understanding it is a disease of understanding, depleting the sense of efficacy and paralyzing effort, unless it finds healing work." Excerpt From The World-Ending Fire Wendell Berry This material may be protected by copyright.

You must not let your hope turn into expectation.

Death is a sort of lens, thought I used to think of it as a wall or shut door. It changes things and makes them clear.

To be the mother of a grown-up child means that you don't have a child anymore, and that is sad. When the grown-up child leaves home, that is sadder.

He didn't know, as we grownups knew, what the war meant and might mean. He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.

He knew that I was living in loss. He knew, if anybody did, that there was nothing that could be done about it, nothing certainly that he could do, and yet he came. He came to offer himself, to be with us in Virgil's absence, to love us without hope or help, as he had to do. This was a baby that needed to be stood by, and he stood by her.

the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in.

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.

And so how was a human to pray? I didn't know, and yet I prayed. I prayed the terrible prayer: "Thy will be done." Having so prayed, I prayed for strength. That seemed reasonable and right enough. As did praying for forgiveness and the grace to forgive. I prayed unreasonably, foolishly, hopelessly, that everybody in Port William might be blessed and happy—the ones I loved and the ones I did not. I prayed my gratitude. The

The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as a person.

Loving the forest, you enter it to walk and watch. As you observe its manifold and comely life, it enters familiarly into imagination, and so into sympathy. By sympathy the mind in the forest is made at home.

Se poate întâmpla ca, atunci când nu mai È™tim ce s? facem, s? fi ajuns la adev?rata noastr? munc?, iar când nu mai È™tim pe ce cale s? o lu?m, s? fi început adev?rata noastr? c?l?torie.

Our workplaces are more and more exclusively given over to production, and our dwelling places to consumption.

And of course Cecelia held some secret doubts about herself; you can't dislike nearly everybody and be quite certain that you have exempted yourself.

I lost no time, of course, in telling him about the book I wanted to write. Not, by then, to my surprise, he readily understood what I had in mind and what my needs and problems were going to be. Our talk was not only thoroughly enjoyable and immediately useful; it was also an immense relief. If it was possible for a person of my loyalties and convictions to find one friend and ally, it might be possible to find others. Apparently I was not as odd as I had feared.

He said that when we finally did get the farm paid for we could tell everybody to go to hell. That was what he lived for, to own his farm without having to say please or thank you to a living soul.

The most appropriate governmental powers are negative-those, that is, that protect the small and the weak from the great and powerful, not those by which the government becomes the profligate, ineffectual parent of the small and weak after it has permitted the great and powerful to make them helpless.

Between these two programs---the industrial and the agrarian, the global and the local---the most critical difference is that of knowledge. The global economy institutionalizes a global ignorance, in which producers and consumers cannot know or care about one another, and in which the histories of all products will be lost. In such circumstances, the degradation of products and places, producers and consumers, is inevitable.

The English philosopher and geometer, Keith Critchlow, brings his own light to the same point: "The human mind takes apart with its analytic habits of reasoning but the human heart puts things together because it loves them . . ."18

Cecelia, as with every look and gesture she let us know, was entirely at ease only in the company of her equals—a company that included, besides herself, only her sister. And of course Cecelia held some secret doubts about herself; you can't dislike nearly everybody and be quite certain that you have exempted yourself.

We live by the assumption that what's good for us is good for the world. And this is based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what's good for us.