Quotes by Wendell Berry

About Wendell Berry:

Wendell E. Berry is an American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. A prolific author, he has written many novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be ushered into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then; and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joi...

Wendell Berry

Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.

Wendell Berry

This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.

Wendell Berry

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 been divided. I am the child of his forgiveness.

Wendell Berry

For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father's dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones.

Wendell Berry

We depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clum...

Wendell Berry

The divine mandate to use the world justly and charitably, then, defines every person's moral predicament as that of a steward. But this predicament is hopeless and meaningless unless it produces an appropriate discipline: stewardship. And stewardshi...

Wendell Berry

A nuclear reactor is a proposed "solution" to "the energy problem." But like all big-technological "solutions," this one "solves" a single problem by causing many... A garden, on the other hand, is a solution that leads to other solutions. It is a pa...

Wendell Berry

The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.

Wendell Berry

A tree forms itself in answer to its place and the light. Explain it how you will, the only thing explainable will be your explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 IV

Wendell Berry

the inlet our friend looks as he did when we first knew him, and until I wake I believe I will die of grief, for I know that this boy grew into a man who was a faithful friend who died.

Wendell Berry

I’ve come down from the sky like some damned ghost, delayed too long…To the abandoned fields the trees returned and grew. They stand and grow. Time comes To them, time goes, the trees Stand; the only place They go is where they are. Those wholly ...

Wendell Berry

How to be a Poet (to remind myself) Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill-more of each than you have-inspiration work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity… B...

Wendell Berry

I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, t...

Wendell Berry

Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

Wendell Berry

I took her into bed with me and propped myself up with pillows against the headboard to let her nurse. As she nursed and the milk came, she began a little low contented sort of singing. I would feel milk and love flowing from me to her as once it had...

Wendell Berry

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have...

Wendell Berry

Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that most appropriately enlarges th...

Wendell Berry

Some of the most memorable, and least regrettable, nights of my own youth were spent in coon hunting with farmers. There is no denying that these activities contributed to the economy of farm households, but a further fact is that they were pleasures...

Wendell Berry

A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is "a dispenser of the 'Mysteries of God.'" The husband, unlike the "manager" or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery t...

Wendell Berry

We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the exe...

Wendell Berry

Author Bio

  • NameWendell Berry
  • Descriptionauthor
  • BornAugust 5, 1934
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Author; Novelist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; National Humanities Medal; Four Freedoms Award - Freedom Medal