Wendell Berry Quotes

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.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.

I’m a writer more than I am a talker.

If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself… something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.

These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.

We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose.

The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.

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.

I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.

You can’t know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction

The only time I’ve been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

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.

Under the pavement the dirt is dreaming of grass.

The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.