Quotes from Wendell Berry

Though the spring is late and cold, though uproar of greed and malice shudders in the sky, pond, stream, and treetop raise their ancient songs; the robin molds her mud nest with her breast; the air is bright with breath of bloom, wise loveliness that asks nothing of the season but to be.

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. — Wendell Berry, from "How To Be a Poet," Given . (Counterpoint March 1, 2006) Originally published 2005.

He is long past sleep now. His mind has begun to work on the agenda that it sets for itself, and he knows that he will not be able to stop it.

But won't you be ashamed To count the passing year At its mere cost, your debt Inevitably paid? For every year is costly, As you know well. Nothing Is given that is not Taken, and nothing taken That was not first a gift.

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.

it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

Surely the creatures of the fifth day of Creation accepted those of the sixth with equanimity, as though they had always been there. Eternity is always present in the animal mind; only men deal in beginnings and ends. It is probably lucky for man that he was created last. He would have got too excited and upset over all the change.

a place where thought can take its shape as quietly in the mind as water in a pitcher...

Somewhere underneath of all the politics, the ambition, the harsh talk, the power, the violence, the will to destroy and waste and maim and burn, was this tenderness. Tenderness born into madness, preservable only by suffering, and finally not preservable at all. What can love do? Love waits, if it must, maybe forever.

Though we invite, this healing comes in answer to another voice than ours; a strength not ours returns

The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved the most valuable evidence is immediately trumped by our inability to know what we have forgotten.

They would not have been easy in their minds if there was something they could have got away with if they had not got away with it.

By their ignorance people enfranchise their exploiters.

A grace living here as we live, Move my mind now to that which holds Things as they change. The warmth has come. The doors have opened. Flower and song Embroider ground and air, lead me Beside the healing field that waits

It bears the gnarls of its history healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection in the warp and bending of its long growth. It has gathered all accidents into its purpose. It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.

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.

My Mind became the root of my life rather than its sublimation

My life, though, has been something (as only now at last I am able to see), but it is something that it has made of itself, not something that I have made of it. All I seem to have done is avoid wherever I could (so far) the man across the desk—for (so far) the world has afforded a little room for a few of us, lucky or blessed, to go around him. And now I wonder if I can die quickly enough and secretly enough to make the final evasion.

How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? And that question is made legitimate by another: How have men improved themselves by submitting to it? The answer is that men have not, and women cannot, improve themselves by submitting to it.

it.The organized church comes immediately under a compulsion to think of itself, and identify itself to the world, not as an institution synonymous with its truth and its membership, but as a hodgepodge of funds, properties, projects, and offices, all urgently requiring economic support.

There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool. There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.

He been a good man always, I think, but this tenderness was new. It was the tenderness of an old man who had been busy all his life but now had time to pay attention to useless things. But it was more than that . . . a suffering he neither complained of nor denied.

And in the fields and the town, walking, standing, or sitting under the trees, resting and talking together in the peace of a sabbath profound and bright, are people of such beauty that he weeps to see them. He sees that these are the membership of one another and of the place and of the song or light in which they live and move.

It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help.