I’m a writer more than I am a talker.
WENDELL BERRYTo hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we ‘know’ that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…
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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:
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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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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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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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I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.
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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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I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever.
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We have to regard them as gifts because we couldn’t make them. We have to regard them as good gifts because we couldn’t live without them.
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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
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It 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.
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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
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The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.
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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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The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
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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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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.
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The 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.
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We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.
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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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All right, every day ain’t going to be the best day of your life, don’t worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.
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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes.
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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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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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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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There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
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