My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
WENDELL BERRYMy belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
WENDELL BERRYThe fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
WENDELL BERRYUrban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
WENDELL BERRYAn economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
WENDELL BERRYThe old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.
WENDELL BERRYThese are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.
WENDELL BERRYThe atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.
WENDELL BERRYThe ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.
WENDELL BERRYIt 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.
WENDELL BERRYWhether we or our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
WENDELL BERRYIf 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:
WENDELL BERRYI’m a writer more than I am a talker.
WENDELL BERRYThe past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
WENDELL BERRYIt is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
WENDELL BERRYPrayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
WENDELL BERRYA longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
WENDELL BERRY