Wendell Berry Quotes
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The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
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Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium.
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Ask the world to reveal its quietude - not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
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The two great aims of industrialism - replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy - seem close to fulfillment.
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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.
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To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.
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I've had a good life, and was born to and among people I've admired and loved.
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It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
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We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it, we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.
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To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
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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.
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I'm a writer more than I am a talker.
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An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.
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We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness 'to act alone,' its willingness to be everybody's enemy.
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Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
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Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
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If you know even as little history as I do, it is hard not to doubt the efficacy of modern war as a solution to any problem except that of retribution - the 'justice' of exchanging one damage for another.
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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.
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It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.
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The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves...
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The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
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We are living even now among punishments and ruins.