Quotes from Wendell Berry

Or rather that crisp command fell upon the current of his thought like a dry leaf on the surface of a deeply flowing stream, to be borne forty years away.

We are in the habit of contention—against the world, against each other, against ourselves. It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. 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. The crisis of this line of thought is the realization that we are at once limited and unendingly responsible for what we know and do.

But I had read all of [the Bible] by then, and I could see that it changed. And if it changed, how could all of it be true?

Look in and see him looking out. He is not always quiet, but there have been times when happiness has come to him, unasked, like the stillness on the water that holds the evening clear while it subsides - and he let go what he was not.

I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my own forever, and my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.

Teaching as a purpose, as such, is difficult to prescribe or talk about because the thing it is proposing to make is usually something so vague as "understanding.

New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure. "What can't be helped must be endured," Mat Feltner said. And he was a man who knew.

If we removed the status and compensation from the destructive exploits we classify as "manly," men would be found to be suffering as much as women. They would be found to be suffering for the same reason: they are in exile from the communion of men and women, which is their deepest connection with the communion of all creatures.

Because I have never separated myself from my home neighborhood, I cannot identify myself to myself apart from it. I am fairly literally flesh of its flesh. It is present in me, and to me, wherever I go. This

I believe in American political principles, and I will not sit idly by and see those principles destroyed by sorry practice. I am ashamed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles.

And then Andy told him about Meikelberger's farm. Had Isaac ever thought of buying more land — say, a neighbor's farm? Well, if I did I've have to go in debt to buy it, and to farm it. It would be more time and help than I've got. And I'd lose my neighbor. You'd rather have your neighbor? We're supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves. We try. If you need them, it helps.