The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.
WENDELL BERRYAnnual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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If 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.
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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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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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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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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it.
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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
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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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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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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.
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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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If we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.
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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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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.
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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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To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
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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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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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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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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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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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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.
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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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I’m a writer more than I am a talker.
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Whether we or our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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