Quotes from Wendell Berry

As Sir Albert Howard, a British agrarian much admired by Berry, once put it in The Soil and Health: "The using up of fertility is a transfer of past capital and of future possibilities to enrich a dishonest present: it is banditry pure and simple.

The modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing it cannot prove, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.

All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows.

They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself.

The specialists are profiting too well from the symptoms, evidently, to be concerned about cures—just as the myth of imminent cure (by some "breakthrough" of science or technology) is so lucrative and all-justifying as to foreclose any possibility of an interest in prevention.

A number of people, by now, have told me that I could greatly improve things by buying a computer. My answer is that I am not going to do it. I have several reasons, and they are good ones.

I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to learn.

But there, in her diminishment, she seemed to resemble only herself, as if suffering finally had singled her out.

Bewildered in our timely dwelling place, Where we arrive by work, we stay by grace.

I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay. I hoped to live here the rest of my life. And once that was settled I began to see the place with a new clarity and a new understanding and a new seriousness.

A spring wind blowing the smell of the ground through the intersections of traffic, the mind turns, seeks a new nativity- another place, simpler, less weighted by what has already been.

It was something I might have prayed for, if I had thought of it, but it was not among the possibilities I had foreseen. It was just a good thing that came.

For many, the whole process of intellectual and literary growth is a movement, not through or beyond, but away from the people and society they know best, the faiths they still at bottom accept, the little raw provincial world for which they keep an apologetic affection.

I was glad enough that I had not become a preacher, and so would not have to go through a war pretending that Jesus had not told us to love our enemies.

The old complex life, at once economic and social, was fairly coherent and self-sustaining because each community was focused upon its own local countryside and upon its own people, their needs, and their work. That life is now almost entirely gone. It has been replaced by the dispersed lives of dispersed individuals, commuting and consuming, scattering in every direction every morning, returning at night only to their screens and carryout meals.

when state and national governments begin to act in effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and their people's products for low prices, then the rights and liberties of citizenship must necessarily shrink.

And I have dreamed of the morning coming in like a bird through the window not burdened by a thought, —Wendell Berry, from "The Design of The House: Ideal and Hard Time," New Collected Poems (Counterpoint Press, 2012)

There is no good reason for the government to treat homosexuals as a special category of persons.

Why must the gate be narrow? Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened. To come into the woods you must leave behind the six day's world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes. You must come without weapon or tool, alone, expecting nothing, remembering nothing, into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.

A window opening on nothing but the blank sky was endlessly attractive to me; if I watched long enough, a bird or a cloud would appear within the frame, and I watched with patience.

Beyond all history that he knows, Where trees like great saints stand in time, Eternal in their patience. Loss Has rectified the songs that come Into this columned room, and he Only in silence, nothing in hand Comes here. A generosity Is here by which the fallen stand.

We must take love to the limit of time, because time can not limit it. A life cannot limit it. Maybe to have it in your heart all your life in this world, even while it fails here, is to succeed. Maybe that is enough.

I began to take for granted that I was somewhere, and somewhere that I knew, but I never quite felt that I was somewhere I wanted to be.

So what was still and dark wakes up, Becomes intelligent, moves, names Itself by hunger and by kind, Walks, swims, flies, cries, calls, speaks, or sings. We all are praising, praying to The light we are, but cannot know.