Quotes from Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be -- I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.

The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.

Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.

But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.