Wendell Berry

The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

If we can't afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we're in an insurmountable mess.

I'm a writer more than I am a talker.

The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.

I've had a good life, and was born to and among people I've admired and loved.

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.

It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.

To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.

For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.

The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.

These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.

We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.

The old and honorable idea of 'vocation' is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.

Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

This, I thought, is what is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.