Quotes from Wendell Berry

I would be back in my garden all the time, working or just looking….I knew better than to expect a visible difference in an hour, but I looked anyhow.

Except to the insane narrow-mindedness of industrial economics, selfishness does not pay.

You might be thinking by now that I had a lot of aunts and uncles, but that was just the courtesy of those days; children were not allowed to go around first-naming older people.

And I sat there trying to think, and failing, thinking only that whatever I would say was probably going to be a surprise to me.

it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all.

he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no better place than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew, to welcome one's part in it anew.

And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.

We have, in fact, been turning our country into an economy as fast as possible, and we have been doing so by an unaccounted squandering of its actual, its natural and its cultural, wealth.

But politicians quickly learned to pacify the liberals by passing laws and regulations that, to pacify the conservatives, would not be enforced.

And when we finally gathered ourselves together again among the ruins, we were changed.

Again the air is full of falling: the fall of the leaves in the weighty season that brings all home again to the lowly miracle from which they came.

The Wild Geese (excerpt) Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.

His life has never rested on anything he has known beforehand — none of it. He chose it before he knew it, and again afterwards.

So we stood there, not knowing either how to stay or how to go, and felt the weight of that failure.

NOTICE Persons attempting to find a "text" in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.

When he "stood up against this southern way of life," he had to stand alone; the other members of the union fled. He knew the exultation of his stand: "That made me merry in a way. I done what was right . . . "But he also knew its tragedy: "When they shot me it didn't shake me, when they arrested me it didn't shake me. But it shook me to see my friends was but few.

A lamplit table spread Old hospitality Of cheese and wine and bread. - 1993 V Remembering Evia

Every community needs to learn how much of the local land is locally owned, and how much is available for local needs and uses.

having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.   In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest.   In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.

Every day you have less reason Not to give yourself away. - 1993 I

Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.