Quotes from Wendell Berry

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes the responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill. Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

No matter what laws or governments say, men can only know and come to care for one another by meeting face to face, arduously, and by the willing loss of comfort.

Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

His work has been his necessity and his desire.

Of course, what I wasn't telling myself, and maybe was trying not to know (though I did know), was that at Squire's Landing, and Goforth too, things were already changed. The things I was remembering were gone from everywhere except my mind.

felt older. I felt that I had seen ages of the world come and go. Now, finally, I really had lost all desire for change, every last twinge of the notion that I ought to get somewhere or make something of myself. I was what I was. "I will stand like a tree," I thought, "and be in myself as I am." And the things of Port William seemed to stand around me, in themselves as they were.

The love he bore to me was his own, but also it was a love that had been borne to him, by people he knew, people I now knew, people he loved. That, I think, is what put tears in his eyes when he looked at me. He must have wondered if I would love those people too. Well, as it turned out, I did. And I would know them as he had never known them, for longer than he knew them. I knew them old, in their final years and days. I know them dead.

If we are serious about these big problems, we have got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves. Thus we put an end to our habit of oversimplification. If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we ourselves must be prepared to become poorer. If

XXII. The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. It is wrong to suppose that we can exploit and impoverish the poorer countries, while arming them and instructing them in the newest means of war, and then reasonably expect them to be peaceable.

The stories they tell become tragic because the interest of the land, the human investment of interest and affection in the land, becomes subordinated to the interest of a 'larger' economy that removes the human interest native to a place and replaces it with its own interest in itself.

History goes blind and in darkness, neither sees nor is seen, nor is known except as a carrion marked with unintelligible wounds; dragging its dead body, living, yet to be born, it moves heavily to its glories. It tramples the little towns, forgets their names.

Dressed up, he never looked like he was wearing his own clothes.

And I told him that a man's life is always dealing with permanence—that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

For in that little while Port William sank into me, becoming one with the matter and light, and the darkness, of my mind, never again to be far from my thoughts, no matter where I went or what I did.

Let the fragments of love be reassembled in you. Only then will you have true courage. Hayden Carruth

Now, surely, I am getting old, for my memory of myself as a young man seems now to be complete, as a story told. The young man leaps, and lands on an old man's legs.

Whereas his father only ruled him, Aunt Molly owned him outright, at least when he was in the house where she could get at him.

There is nothing very instructive, for example, in hearing that "the cow jumped over the moon," but who is not delighted by that poem's exuberant indifference to the possibility of making sense? It is a masterpiece. Even so, I am happy to know that some poems delight and instruct, which is a richer possibility.

But the environmental crisis rises close to home. Every time we draw a breath, every time we drink a glass of water, we are suffering from it. And more important, every time we indulge in, or depend on, the wastefulness of our economy - and our economy's first principle is waste - we are causing the crisis. Nearly every one of us, nearly every day of his life, is contributing directly to the ruin of this planet.

Just so, an honest poet who is making a poem is doing neither more nor less than making a poem, I distracted by the thought even that it will be read. Poets, or some poets, bear witness as faithfully as possible to what they have experienced or observed, suffered or enjoyed, and this inevitably is instructive to anybody able to be instructed. But the instruction is secondary. It must be embodied in the work.

Troy went into debt and bought his new equipment because he didn't want to be held back by demanding circumstances.

Sometimes hidden from me in daily custom and in trust, so that I live by you unaware as by the beating of my heart, Suddenly you flare in my sight, a wild rose blooming at the edge of thicket, grace and light where yesterday was only shade, and once again I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before

The value of land, like the value of a life, is unreckonable and absolute.

As I look back over my work of several decades, I can see that the back-and-forth of my thoughts has hardly been graceful, as it is hardly graceful in these present pages. It will probably have to be seen as a struggle to find or recover the language necessary to speak, in the same breath, of work and love.