Wendell Berry Quotes - Page 2

We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.

Dance,' they told me, and I stood still,
and while I stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.

'Pray,' they said, and I laughed,
covering myself in the earth's brightnesses,
and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel,
and prayed like an orphan.

It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.

...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 legitimate hope.

I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting - the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun.

When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.

When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.

It is to be broken. It is to be
torn open. It is not to be
reached and come to rest in
ever. I turn against you,
I break from you, I turn to you.
We hurt, and are hurt,
and have each other for healing.
It is healing. It is never whole.

Marriage has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. (from "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine")

And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.

The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.

No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse.

Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.

He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.