Wendell Berry Quotes

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.

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 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.

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.

It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.

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.

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

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.

When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.

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

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.

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

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.

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

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