Quotes from Wendell Berry

To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.

It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.

A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.

So it is that the life force may take possession of a man-- so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.

The world is whole beyond human knowing.

I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.

This, I thought, is what is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.

To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.

The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.

Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.