Quotes from Wendell Berry

To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.

It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.

A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.

Do not tax your life with forethought of grief.

So it is that the life force may take possession of a man-- so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.

Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.

The world is whole beyond human knowing.

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.

I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.

This, I thought, is what is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.

To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.

The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.

The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.

The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.

If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.

Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

I'm a writer more than I am a talker.

I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.

I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.

A tree forms itself in answer to its place and the light. Explain it how you will, the only thing explainable will be your explanation." Sabbaths 1999 IV

A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.