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Wendell Berry Quotes

Total quotes: 5
“Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.”
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
Tagged: prayer, Goodness, Praying
“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.”
— Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth: A Novel
“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.”
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
Tagged: Farm, Farming, Soil, Agriculture
“Last summer we put up our second cutting of alfalfa on an extremely hot, humid afternoon. There was no breeze at all. The hot, bright, moist air seemed to wrap around us and stick to us while we loaded the wagons. It was worse in the barn, where the tin roof raised the temperature and held the air even closer and stiller. We worked more quietly than we usually do, not having breath for talk. It was miserable, no doubt about it. And there was not a push button anywhere in reach. 

But we stayed there and did the work, were even glad to do it, and experienced no futurological fits. When we were done we told stories and laughed and talked a long time, sitting on a post pile in the shade of a big elm. It was a pleasing day. 

Why was it pleasing? Nobody will ever figure that out by a “logical projection.” The matter is too complex and too profound for logic. It was pleasing, for one thing, because we got done. That does not make logic, but it makes sense. For another thing, it was good hay, and we got it up in good shape. For another, we like each other and we work together because we want to.”
— Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land
Tagged: Beyond Logic, Defining Happiness
“When despair for the world grows in me 
and I wake in the night at the least sound 
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, 
I go and lie down where the wood drake 
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. 
I come into the peace of wild things 
who do not tax their lives with forethought 
of grief. I come into the presence of still water. 
And I feel above me the day-blind stars 
waiting with their light. For a time 
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
— Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
Tagged: Nature, Peace, Despair, Grief
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