Quotes from Wendell Berry

But, my dear boy, you don't eat or drink the law, or sit in the shade of it or warm yourself by it, or wear it, or have your being in it. The law exists only to serve.

This, I thought, is what is meant by "thy will be done" in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. 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. It means you may be crucified.

I sat down in a chair by the bed. The house got altogether still again, and I thought he was asleep. Just ever so quietly I reached over and laid my hand on his shoulder. He said, 'I love you too, Hannah. He didn't last long after that. Death had become his friend. They say that people, if they want to, can let themselves slip away when the time comes. I think that is what Nathan did. He was not false or greedy. When the time came to go, he went.

As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.

Maybe the world is waiting for you to give yourself to it. Maybe it's only then that things can work themselves out.

But I would have a darkness in my mind like the dark the dead calf makes for a time on the grass where he lies, and will make in the earth as he is carried down. May all dead things lie down in me and be at peace, as in the ground.

Why do the health of the body and the health of the earth decline together?

Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence - that is to wish to preserve all of its humble house - holds and neighbourhoods.

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health—and create profitable diseases and dependences—by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.

And yet a knowledge is here that tenses the throat as for song: the inheritance of the ones, alive or once alive, who stand behind the ones I have imagined, who took into their minds the troubles of this place, blights of love and race, but saw a good fate here and willingly paid its cost, kept it the best they could, thought of its good, and mourned the good they lost. (From the ending of Where in Clearing, p179)

And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.

I don't remember when I did not know Port William, the town and the neighborhood. My relation to that place, my being in it and my absences from it, is the story of my life. That story has surprised me almost every day—but now, in the year 1986, so near the end, it seems not surprising at all but only a little strange, as if it all has happened to somebody I don't yet quite know. Certainly, all of it has happened to somebody younger.