Quotes from Wendell Berry

The customers of The War (all of us, that is) purchase life at a great cost and yet lose it.

But all those who were there, if they had lived past childhood, had twice in this world, first and last, been as helpless as a little child.

No one has made the art by which one makes the works of art. Each one who speaks speaks as a convocation. We live as councils of ghosts. It is not human genius that makes us human, but an old love, an old intelligence of the heart we gather to us from the world, from the creatures, from the angels of inspiration, from the dead-- an intelligence merely nonexistent to those who do not have it, but -- to those who have it more dear than life.

And so there is the Territory of self-righteousness. It is easy to assume that we do not participate in what we are not in the presence of. But if we are members of a society, we participate, willy-nilly, in its evils.

From cloud to sea to cloud, I climb The deer road through the leafless trees Under a wind that batters limb On limb, still roaring as it has Two nights and days, cold in slow spring. But ancient song in a wild throat Recalls itself and starts to sing In storm-cleared light...

Having paid for life, we receive death. By now, in this nineteen hundred and eighty-sixth Year of Our Lord, we all have purchased how many shares in death? How many bombs, shells, mines, guns, grenades, poisons, anonymous murders, nameless sufferings, official secrets? But not the controlling share. Death cannot be marketed in controlling shares.

In a conversation, you always expect a reply. And if you honor the other party to the conversation, if you honor the otherness of the other party, you understand that you must not expect always to receive a reply that you foresee or a reply that you will like.

of all bad motives none may be worse or more hopeless than fear. Nobody, I think, has ever done good work because of fear. Good work is done by knowing how and by love. Love requires faith, courage, patience, and steadiness, none of which can come from fear.

knowing how she was wrung all her life between her cherished resentments and her fierce affections. A peculiar sorrow hovered about her, and not only for the inevitable losses and griefs of her years; it came also from her settled conviction of the tendency of things to be unsatisfactory, to fail to live up to expectation, to fall short.

I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

The same rift ran through everything at Pigeonville College; the only difference was that I was able to see it more clearly, and to wonder at it. Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul.

expectations.

In this brief Sabbath now, time fit To be eternal. Such a bliss Of bloom's no ornament, but root And light, a saving loveliness, Starred firmament here underfoot.

Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn't be divided from the days he'd spent at work in his fields. Daddy had told us we didn't know what the country would look like without him at work in the middle of it; and that was as true of Grandpa as it was of Daddy. We wouldn't recognize the country when he was dead.

He turned to his own place then . . . and began to ask what might be the best use of it. How might a family live there without reducing it?

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

If the people in our state and national governments undertook to evaluate economic enterprises by the standards of long-term economics, they would have to employ their minds in actual thinking. For many of them, this would be a shattering experience, something altogether new, but it would also cause them to learn things and do things that would improve the lives of their constituents.

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't. Burley Coulter

All friends and comfortable with each other have ceased to talk, each occupied in that wide quiet with his own thoughts.

The warmth has come. The doors have opened. Flower and song Embroider ground and air, lead me Beside the healing field that waits; Growth, death, and a restoring form Of human use will make it well. But I go on, beyond, higher In the hill's fold, forget the time I come from and go to, recall This grove left out of all account, A place enclosed in song.

Aunt Beulah could hear the dust motes collide in a sunbeam; she could hear spiders chewing on flies.

It was as though I knew without exactly knowing, or felt, or smelled in the air, the already accomplished fact that nothing would ever be simple for me again. I never again would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away.

Used as he is to the expansive labor of the fields, he is enjoying the smallness and neatness of this task.

we had better bear in mind also something that I am not the first or the smartest writer to notice: that for the making and sustenance of movements hatred is more effective than love.