Quotes by Wendell Berry

“In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It w...”

“The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship and then in mariage. My grandfather made a peace here that has joined many who would otherwise have...”

“I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One ...”

“I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And ...”

“And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.”

“I finally knew... why Christ's prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh. He was one of us. Once He had become mortal, He could not become immortal ...”

“And I knew that the Spirit that had gone forth to shape the world and make it live was still alive in it. I just had no doubt. I could see that I lived in the created world, and it was still being ...”

“Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heard 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 n...”

“If God loves the world, might that not be proved in my own love for it? I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my ...”

“My vision of the gathered church that had come to me... had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the f...”

“Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken by as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue...”

“There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.”

“If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line - starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory an...”

“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 call...”

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

“We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness…True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of o...”

“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 li...”

“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 he...”

“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 soone...”

“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 n...”