Wendell Berry

Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heart why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope.What good did I get from it? I got to have love in my heart.

That one American farmer can now feed himself and fifty-six other people may be, within the narrow view of the specialist, a triumph of technology; by no stretch of reason can it be considered a triumph of agriculture or of culture. It has been made possible by the substitution of energy for knowledge, of methodology for care, of technology for morality.

I thought that some of the hymns bespoke the true religion of the place. The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but still they liked it. What they came together for was to acknowledge, just by coming, their losses and failures and sorrows, their need for comfort, their faith always needing to be greater, their wish (in spite of all words and acts to the contrary) to love one another and to forgive and be forgiven, their need for one another's help and company and divine gifts, their hope (and experience) of love surpassing death, their gratitude.

The Earth is what we all have in common.

In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree. (pg. 123, The Body and the Earth)

Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustn__ shirk it. Love, after all, 'hopeth all things.' But maybe you must learn, and it is hard learning, not to hope out loud, especially for other people. You must not let your hope turn into expectation.

As I age in the world it will rise and spread,and be for this place horizonand orison, the voice of its winds.I have made myself a dream to dreamof its rising, that has gentled my nights.Let me desire and wish well the lifethese trees may live when Ino longer rise in the morningsto be pleased with the green of themshining, and their shadows on the ground, and the sound of the wind in them.

Cecelia, as with every look and gesture she let us know, was entirely at ease only in the company of her equals _ a company that included, besides herself, only her sister. And of course Cecelia held some secret doubts about herself; you can__ dislike nearly everybody and be quite certain that you have exempted yourself.

Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.

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.

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness_True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.One__ inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one__ most intimate sources.In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. (pg. 260, The Idea of a Local Economy)

No settled family or community has ever called its home place an __nvironment._ None has ever called its feeling for its home place __iocentric_ or __nthropocentric._ None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as __cological,_ deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of __cology_ and __cosystems._ But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people.And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is __ork._ We are connected by work even to the places where we don__ work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is __ood work,_ for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth.The name of our present society__ connection to the earth is __ad work_ _ work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor. Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breast-beating and confession; it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it.

...make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came." Wendell Berry

...our great modern error is the belief that we must invariably give up one thing in order to have another. But it is possible, for instance, to find comfort, pleasure, and beauty in food, clothing, and shelter. It is possible to find pleasure and beauty and even "recreation" in work. It is possible to have farms that do not waste and poison the natural world.

And now in my tenderness of remembering it all again, I think I am still there with him too. I am there with all the others, most of them gone but some who are still here, who gave me love and called forth love from me. When I number them over, I am surprised how many there are. And so I have to say that another of the golden threads is gratitude.I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts.

...a book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one's bodily life.

Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture. (Health Is Membership, pg. 98)