Going Home With Wendell Berry

the parochial person is always assured of the imaginative sufficiency of the parish. The local place. It’s a very beautiful way of putting it (View Highlight)

You’ve got to decide what comes first, and then you work your way to the revelation of what comes last. But the parts also have to be ordered. And if they’re ordered properly on a farm, something even more miraculous than most art happens: you have sustainability. Each thing supports the whole thing. (View Highlight)

The conversion experience, whenever it happens, invites you to despise yourself as you were. (View Highlight)

When love comes round, it doesn’t always come and stay with the purpose of making you happy. As I see it, when we marry we give up romance by submitting love to the limits of mortality. The traditional vows seize love by the scruff of the neck and set it down in real life, in the real world. (View Highlight)

A good farmer is one who brings competent knowledge, work wisdom, and a locally adapted agrarian culture to a particular farm that has been lovingly studied and learned over a number of years. (View Highlight)

It’s not deterministic, which is what people really want. They want it to be decided by fate, or technology, or genetics, or something. (View Highlight)

You’re being fed in an essential way by the beauty of things you read and hear and look at. A well-made sentence, I think, is a thing of beauty. (View Highlight)

Maybe we’re born with a kind of an instinct to want to be elated. What is meant by that is an onset of happiness. Happiness in the onset of the unexpected good. Maybe this is deeply planted in us, this sense that what we’re here for is to be elated and to be loved. So, you look at somebody you love. And if you live with them, maybe you do it every day. Your heart swells, and you know you’re happy. (View Highlight)

I don’t think so. You must either decide this is worth working at, or just leave it undone. Marriage is not perfect agreement. But you’ve accepted this other person into your mind. I work alone, but always with her presence in my mind. (View Highlight)

I mean, if we submit to the scientific definition of love, that leaves us with something glandular that has a completely arbitrary existence. So we’re trying so often, it seems to me, to use a language we have sort of topped, as we might top a tree, chopping off the top branches. Without soul and love, those words that are enabled by religion, then we’re reduced to a choiceless biological existence. (View Highlight)

We really have to turn against the selfishness of the individualism that sees everybody as a competitor of everybody else. When we see how destructive that is, and we turn against it, then we have our life’s work. (View Highlight)

It’s a very crude little camp house. Sixteen by twelve, probably. And it’s a mess. I’ve been working there since 1963. There are a lot of expectations dwelling there. It’s a funny thing, but when I go there, I don’t delay much, I just sit right down and go to work. It doesn’t have an electric line going into it. I’m not much distracted, once I’m there. (View Highlight)