Quotes from Wendell Berry

He pushes the doors open and calls the sheep, standing back out of the way as they come in and crowd to the troughs. He stays there a while, looking over the field, making sure that none has been left out. He feels growing in him now, in spite of all, a familiar and precious calm. The flock is in the barn, well fed, safe from dogs and the cold, warmly bedded. They will be there safe until morning. If not today, on most of the winter days of his life this completeness has filled his mind.

And so our reclamation project has been, for me, less a matter of idealism or morality than a kind of self-preservation. A destructive history, once it is understood as such, is a nearly insupportable burden. Understanding it is a disease of understanding, depleting the sense of efficacy and paralyzing effort, unless it finds healing work." Excerpt From The World-Ending Fire Wendell Berry This material may be protected by copyright.

You must not let your hope turn into expectation.

Death is a sort of lens, thought I used to think of it as a wall or shut door. It changes things and makes them clear.

He didn't know, as we grownups knew, what the war meant and might mean. He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.

He knew that I was living in loss. He knew, if anybody did, that there was nothing that could be done about it, nothing certainly that he could do, and yet he came. He came to offer himself, to be with us in Virgil's absence, to love us without hope or help, as he had to do. This was a baby that needed to be stood by, and he stood by her.

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.

And so how was a human to pray? I didn't know, and yet I prayed. I prayed the terrible prayer: "Thy will be done." Having so prayed, I prayed for strength. That seemed reasonable and right enough. As did praying for forgiveness and the grace to forgive. I prayed unreasonably, foolishly, hopelessly, that everybody in Port William might be blessed and happy—the ones I loved and the ones I did not. I prayed my gratitude. The

The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as a person.

Loving the forest, you enter it to walk and watch. As you observe its manifold and comely life, it enters familiarly into imagination, and so into sympathy. By sympathy the mind in the forest is made at home.

Se poate întâmpla ca, atunci când nu mai È™tim ce s? facem, s? fi ajuns la adev?rata noastr? munc?, iar când nu mai È™tim pe ce cale s? o lu?m, s? fi început adev?rata noastr? c?l?torie.

He said that when we finally did get the farm paid for we could tell everybody to go to hell. That was what he lived for, to own his farm without having to say please or thank you to a living soul.