Quotes from Wendell Berry

It is a question with me still, and the answer has altogether disappeared from the world.

But if nobody can ever quite be nothing to you in Port William, then everybody finally has got to be something to you.

the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character.

But it seemed to me that even if everything had been changed, I would have recognized it by the look of the sky.

The more local and settled the culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert.

If a soft answer turneth away wrath, maybe no answer stirreth wrath up.

But the safe competence of human work extends no further, ever, than our ability to think and love at the same time.

And there was a perfectly lovely room called the Browsing Room, with shelf upon shelf of books, and several tall windows looking out into the trees, and easy chairs with reading lamps, and sofas. It was far and away the finest, most comfortable room I had ever seen in my life, and I loved to sit in it.

Books were a dependable pleasure.

For a long time then I seemed to live by the slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads that joined all the strands together, making a life.

It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people's money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes.

A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.

But ignorance of when to stop is a modern epidemic; it is the basis of industrial progress and economic growth. The most obvious practical result of this ignorance is a critical disproportion of scale between the scale of human enterprises and their sources in nature.

Big Ellis giggled. "We heard you were dead, Burley." "So did I," Uncle Burley said. "But I knew it was a lie as soon as I heard it.

There is a sense in which I no longer "go to work." If I live in my place, which is my subject, then I am "at" my work even when I am not working. It is "my" work because I cannot escape it.

Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.

Wrong was easy; gravity helped it. Right is difficult and long. In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

Another place! it's enough to grieve me – that old dream of going, of becoming a better man just by getting up and going to a better place.

The earth, which we all have in common, is our deepest bond, and our behavior toward it cannot help but be an earnest of our consideration for each other and for our descendants. To corrupt or destroy the natural environment is an act of violence not only against the earth but also against those who are dependent on it, including ourselves. To waste the soil is to cause hunger, as direct an aggression as an armed attack; it is an act of violence against the future of the human race.

The willingness to abuse other bodies is the willingness to abuse one's own. To damage the earth is to damage your children. To despise the ground is to despise its fruit; to despise the fruit is to despise its eaters. The wholeness of health is broken by despite" (The Unsettling of America).

If Cecelia was my enemy, that was because (as I now believe) she saw me as her enemy. As the town's barber, as the host of that mostly masculine enclosure, the barbershop, and as the town's permanent bachelor, a piece of raw material permanently raw, forever to be unimproved by a woman of her discriminating powers, I must have seemed to her to be the very gatekeeper of that unregulated other world that Roy eased away into whenever he eased away.

There are two healings: nature's, and ours and nature's. Nature's will come in spite of us, after us, over the graves of its wasters, as it comes to the forsaken fields. The healing that is ours and nature's will come if we are willing, if we are patient, if we know the way, if we will do the work.

The question stands and waits, to be asked and asked, never finally to be answered, which he believes affirms a kind of faith. The world is fitted together, is held in its place in the great sky, has held together so far, through the worst of human damage so far, and by no human's power to save or make or know. That he can sometimes fit a mere poem's parts together is his fallback position, a sign of his limits, his formal ignorance, his faith in the great coherence.

The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical—in short, a victim. When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous.