Wendell Berry Quotes - Page 17

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• I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.

  Wendell Berry

  Beautiful, Thinking, World

  Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

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• This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.

  Wendell Berry

  Lying, Book, Reflection

  Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

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• The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.

  Wendell Berry

  Differences, Perfect, Movement

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.12, Counterpoint

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• It is a fact that the entire Kentucky River system, which the central part of the state complacently depends upon for its future water, is deteriorating rapidly because of strip mining, because of bad farming, because of industrial and agricultural pollutants, because of urban sewage. It is deteriorating, that is to say, because almost nobody cares, or cares to know, where water comes from, so long as it keeps coming.

  Wendell Berry

  Kentucky, Rivers, Long

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• The assumption is that people so ignorant and thoughtless and silly and greedy may simply call upon the Army Corps of Engineers in order to receive a clean and abundant supply of water from reservoirs in the mountains. A much likelier outcome is that they will be drinking an ever stronger mixture of sewage and mine acid and mud and cropspray and various other defecations of the industrial paradise.

  Wendell Berry

  Drinking, Silly, Army

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• The wrecking ball is characteristic of our way with materials. We 'cannot afford' to log a forest selectively, to mine without destroying topography, or to farm without catastrophic soil erosion. A production-oriented economy can indeed live in this way, but only so long as production lasts.

  Wendell Berry

  Erosion, Long, Environmental

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• Because by definition they lack any sense of mutuality or wholeness, our specializations subsist on conflict with one another. The rule is never to cooperate, but rather to follow one's own interest as far as possible. Checks and balances are all applied externally, by opposition, never by self-restraint. Labor, management, the military, the government, etc., never forbear until their excesses arouse enough opposition to force them to do so.

  Wendell Berry

  Military, Government, Self

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• The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.

  Wendell Berry

  Mean, Thinking, Together

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.26, Counterpoint

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• The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day. I have loved it even in the rain. Sometimes I have loved it most in the rain.

  Wendell Berry

  Rain, Garden, Two

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• When you are old you can look back and see yourself when you are young. It is almost like looking down from heaven. And you see yourself as a young woman, just a big girl really, half awake to the world. You see yourself happy, holding in your arms a good, decent, gentle, beloved young man with the blood keen in his veins, who before long is going to disappear, just disappear, into a storm of hate and flying metal and fire. And you just don't know it.

  Wendell Berry

  Girl, Hate, Men

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• To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.

  Wendell Berry

  Common Sense, Mind, Desire

  Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

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• The people who benefit from this state of affairs have been at pains to convince us that the agricultural practices and policies that have almost annihilated the farming population have greatly benefited the population of food consumers. But more and more consumers are now becoming aware that our supposed abundance of cheap and healthful food is to a considerable extent illusory.

  Wendell Berry

  Pain, Practice, Convince Us

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• The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.

  Wendell Berry

  Jobs, Real, Humble

  Wendell Berry (1993). “Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays”, Pantheon

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• The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.

  Wendell Berry

  World, Found

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.311, Counterpoint

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• Supporters of the war are constantly asking those who oppose it: Why don't you deplore the wrongs and atrocities committed by the other side? The answer, so far as I am concerned, is that I do deplore the wrongs and atrocities committed by the other side. But I am responsible for the wrongs and atrocities committed by our side. And I am no longer able to participate in the assumption that atrocities committed by remote control are less objectionable than those committed at arm's length. I am most concerned with American obstacles to peace because I am an American.

  Wendell Berry

  War, Atrocities Committed, Asking

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• It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, People, Abuse

  Wendell Berry (2009). “Remembering”, p.79, Counterpoint Press

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• You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.' And how long is that going to take?' I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.' That could be a long time.' I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.

  Wendell Berry

  Long, Answers, May

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• The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, Made, Concrete

  Wendell Berry (2009). “Remembering”, p.96, Counterpoint Press

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• I took her into bed with me and propped myself up with pillows against the headboard to let her nurse. As she nursed and the milk came, she began a little low contented sort of singing. I would feel milk and love flowing from me to her as once it had flowed to me. It emptied me. As the baby fed, I seemed slowly to grow empty of myself, as if in the presence of that long flow of love even grief could not stand.

  Wendell Berry

  Baby, Grief, Nurse

  Wendell Berry (2005). “Hannah Coulter: A Novel”, p.55, Counterpoint Press

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• You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.

  Wendell Berry

  Soul, Body, Devalue

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.84, Counterpoint

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• The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.

  Wendell Berry

  Thinking, Practice, Forever

  Wendell Berry (2013). “This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems”, p.222, Counterpoint

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• If, on the other hand, conservationists are willing to insist on having the best food, produced in the best way, as close to their homes as possible, and if they are willing to learn to judge the quality of food and food production, then they are going to give economic support to an entirely different kind of land use in an entirely different landscape. This landscape will have a higher ratio of caretakers to acres, of care to use. It will be at once more domestic and more wild than the industrial landscape.

  Wendell Berry

  Home, Land Use, Hands

  Wendell Berry (2010). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Large Print 16pt)”, p.88, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• and in some of the people of the town and community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.

  Wendell Berry

  Somewhere Else, People, Community

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• Do not tax your life with forethought of grief.

  Wendell Berry

  Grief, Taxes, Forethought

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• From the union of power and money, from the union of power and secrecy, from the union of government and science, from the union of government and art, from the union of science and money, from the union of ambition and ignorance, from the union of genius and war, from the union of outer space and inner vacuity, the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.

  Wendell Berry

  Art, War, Ambition

  Wendell Berry (2009). “The Mad Farmer Poems”, p.17, Counterpoint Press

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