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.
WENDELL BERRYTo be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
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 -
I’m a writer more than I am a talker.
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 -
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 -
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
WENDELL BERRY -
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.
WENDELL BERRY -
And 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 BERRY -
Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
WENDELL BERRY -
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
WENDELL BERRY -
I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.
WENDELL BERRY -
We’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 BERRY -
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.
WENDELL BERRY -
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 BERRY -
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.
WENDELL BERRY -
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.
WENDELL BERRY