Quotes from Wendell Berry

Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.

It surely is far better to be disliked by somebody you don't love than by somebody you do. Even so, I mind. Even so, failing to love somebody is a failure.

Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.

To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.

To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.

Love changes, and in change is true.

Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.

The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.

O Thou, Far off and here, whole and broken, Who in necessity and in bounty wait, Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken, By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.

Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous.

An agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking & good eating

The life we want is not merely the one we have chosen and made. It is the one we must be choosing and making

She was another gift, surely, to us all. She was a happiness that made me cry.

If we can't afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we're in an insurmountable mess.

We're all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I'm complicit in the things that I'm trying to oppose.

People who want to see the beauty of nature from motorboats and automobiles would obviously be just as pleased, and as fully recreated, at a drive-in movie.

One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the gospels without feeling that something is amiss.

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.

There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love.

Don't pray for the rain to stop; pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.