Quotes from Wendell Berry

An education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries.

The preserver of abundance is excellence.

Do we, for instance, carry on our work in our nest or do we only reside and get our mail there? Is our nest a place of consumption only or is it also a place of production?

Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark.

You think the winter will never end, and then, when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light.

The approach of a man's life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive.

Most people now are looking for a better place, which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no "better place" than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

The tractor's arrival had signaled, among other things, agriculture's shift from an almost exclusive dependence on free solar energy to a total dependence on costly fossil fuel.

There is a use for everyone.

And now in my tenderness of remembering it all again, I think I am still there with him too. I am there with all the others, most of them gone but some who are still here, who gave me love and called forth love from me. When I number them over, I am surprised how many there are. And so I have to say that another of the golden threads is gratitude. I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts.

The hill is like an old woman, all her human obligations met, who sits at work day after day, in a kind of rapt leisure, at an intricate embroidery. She has time for all things. Because she does not expect ever to be finished, she is endlessly patient with details. She perfects flower and leaf, feather and song, adorning the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever.

She seems to give a respectful credence to the statement that "God is loveonly to hurry on to explore with real interest the possibility that God is wrath." She can read from the book of Revelation with a ringing conviction in her voice that can make the creation seem only a stage setting for the triumphant thunderation of end.