Quotes from Wendell Berry

Though the spring is late and cold, though uproar of greed and malice shudders in the sky, pond, stream, and treetop raise their ancient songs; the robin molds her mud nest with her breast; the air is bright with breath of bloom, wise loveliness that asks nothing of the season but to be.

But won't you be ashamed To count the passing year At its mere cost, your debt Inevitably paid? For every year is costly, As you know well. Nothing Is given that is not Taken, and nothing taken That was not first a gift.

The healing that is ours and nature's will come if we are willing, if we are patient, if we know the way, if we will do the work.

it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

Surely the creatures of the fifth day of Creation accepted those of the sixth with equanimity, as though they had always been there. Eternity is always present in the animal mind; only men deal in beginnings and ends. It is probably lucky for man that he was created last. He would have got too excited and upset over all the change.

Though we invite, this healing comes in answer to another voice than ours; a strength not ours returns

A grace living here as we live, Move my mind now to that which holds Things as they change. The warmth has come. The doors have opened. Flower and song Embroider ground and air, lead me Beside the healing field that waits

My Mind became the root of my life rather than its sublimation.

My life, though, has been something (as only now at last I am able to see), but it is something that it has made of itself, not something that I have made of it. All I seem to have done is avoid wherever I could (so far) the man across the desk—for (so far) the world has afforded a little room for a few of us, lucky or blessed, to go around him. And now I wonder if I can die quickly enough and secretly enough to make the final evasion.

There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool. There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.

And in the fields and the town, walking, standing, or sitting under the trees, resting and talking together in the peace of a sabbath profound and bright, are people of such beauty that he weeps to see them. He sees that these are the membership of one another and of the place and of the song or light in which they live and move.

As Sir Albert Howard, a British agrarian much admired by Berry, once put it in The Soil and Health: "The using up of fertility is a transfer of past capital and of future possibilities to enrich a dishonest present: it is banditry pure and simple.