Quotes from Wendell Berry

There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

Oh Lord, make us able To eat all that's on this table, And if there's some we haven't got Bring it to us while it's hot

That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated. We all, in the course of our daily economic life, consent to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our economic sources in the land, the land-communities, and the land-use economies.

Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. 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.

I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say, "Good-good-good-good-good!" like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith.

When the industrial colonialists and the politicians agree to sacrifice a region to a single economic goal, they inevitably sacrifice the people as well.

These and other things seem clear when they are off on the outer verges of my mind, but then, when I try to see them straight, they grow misty and fade away under the burden of questions.

But we had a year when even to look at one another would make us grieve.

Their failure was something you felt rather than saw.

Wheeler served them as their defender against the law itself, before which they were ciphers, and so felt themselves—and he could do this only as their friend.

I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into it like leaves in the autumn.

If I destroyed what already existed, what would I replace it with? For something always exists before you get there with your desires and visions, and this simply had not occurred to me before in such a way that I could feel the truth of it. What did I have to offer?

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil...It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility...

He loved to handle cash, and he drove himself and all that belonged to him in the direction of money as if it were as far off as heaven and as if he were running out of time;

If we have equality and nothing else — no compassion, no magnanimity, no courtesy, no sense of mutual obligation and dependence, no imagination — then power and wealth will have their way; brutality will rule.

There is also the Territory of historical self-righteousness: if we had lived south of the Ohio in 1830, we would not have owned slaves; if we had lived on the frontier, we would have killed no Indians, violated no treaties, stolen no land. The probability is overwhelming that if we had belonged to the generations we deplore, we too would have behaved deplorably.

What repair, what return, will undo the consuming self-belittlement that inherits, disvalues, neglects, and ruins the decent small farm- the earned, kept, and cherished good of a lifetime's work gone- to break the heart? And yet the light comes. And yet the light is here. Over the long shadows the late light moves in beauty through the living woods.

For many of the churchly, the life of the spirit is reduced to a dull preoccupation with getting to Heaven.

Our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic violence. It is true that economic violence is not always as swift, and is rarely as bloody, as the violence of war, but it can be devastating nonetheless.

The fundamental conflict of our time is that between the creaturely life of Nature's world and the increasingly mechanical life of modern humans.

One morning toward the beginning of that time, while he still remained in charge of his life, though we could see that his departure had begun

She cared for him without hope, because she had passed the place of turning back or looking back. Quietly, almost submissively, she propped herself against him, because in her fate and faith she was opposed to his ruin.

We identify arrogant ignorance by its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thus to put too much at risk.

The pasture, bleached and cold two weeks ago, Begins to grow in the spring light and rain;