Quotes from Wendell Berry

Oh Lord, make us able To eat all that's on this table, And if there's some we haven't got Bring it to us while it's hot

That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated. We all, in the course of our daily economic life, consent to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our economic sources in the land, the land-communities, and the land-use economies.

I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say, "Good-good-good-good-good!" like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith.

Their failure was something you felt rather than saw.

Wheeler served them as their defender against the law itself, before which they were ciphers, and so felt themselves—and he could do this only as their friend.

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil...It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility...

He loved to handle cash, and he drove himself and all that belonged to him in the direction of money as if it were as far off as heaven and as if he were running out of time;

For many of the churchly, the life of the spirit is reduced to a dull preoccupation with getting to Heaven.

The fundamental conflict of our time is that between the creaturely life of Nature's world and the increasingly mechanical life of modern humans.

Kindness is not a word much at home in current political and religious speech, but it is a rich word and a necessary one.

The Bible's aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction.

Whatever happens, those who have learned to love one another have made their way to the lasting world and will not leave, whatever happens.