Quotes from Wendell Berry

There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love.

Don't pray for the rain to stop; pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.

It's the impeded stream that sings.

Especially among Christians in positions of wealth and power, the idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus' commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective Christian.

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.

How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then; and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves

There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.

the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.

My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.

Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.

Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.