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 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 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 BERRYWhether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes.
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 BERRYIf conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.
WENDELL BERRYThere are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
WENDELL BERRYThe fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
WENDELL BERRYA longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
WENDELL BERRYThe primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
WENDELL BERRYWe’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose.
WENDELL BERRYThe care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.
WENDELL BERRYIt is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
WENDELL BERRYThe atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.
WENDELL BERRYThe two great aims of industrialism – replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy – seem close to fulfillment.
WENDELL BERRYAnd to take good care of it, we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.
WENDELL BERRYI 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