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.
WENDELL BERRYI come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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The 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.
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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.
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Urban 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.
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We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
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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.
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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.
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Annual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
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An 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.
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To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
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Why should conservationists have a positive interest in… farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
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The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
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The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
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To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
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There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
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Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.
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These 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.
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The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.
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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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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.
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When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while, you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.
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I’m a writer more than I am a talker.
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Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
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A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.
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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
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