Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
WENDELL BERRYMy belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
-
-
And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.
WENDELL BERRY -
If we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.
WENDELL BERRY -
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:
WENDELL BERRY -
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.
WENDELL BERRY -
To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
WENDELL BERRY -
For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
WENDELL BERRY -
A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
WENDELL BERRY -
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.
WENDELL BERRY -
The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
WENDELL BERRY -
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.
WENDELL BERRY -
To 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.
WENDELL BERRY -
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.
WENDELL BERRY -
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.
WENDELL BERRY -
I’m a writer more than I am a talker.
WENDELL BERRY -
We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
WENDELL BERRY