The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief,… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“Back there in the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“I had changed, and the sign of it was only that my own death seemed to me by far the least important… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief,… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see,… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“We depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“But is work something we have a right to escape? And can we escape it with impunity? We are probably the first… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known… — wendell berry Copy Share Image
“[My grandfather] returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
I finally knew... why Christ's prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh.… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself,… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a boat,… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“the inlet our friend looks as he did when we first knew him, and until I wake I believe I will die… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones,… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“...this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
During the last 17 years... I have been working at the restoration of a once exhausted hillside. Its scars are now healed over, though… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst, we… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship and then in mariage. My grandfather made… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't.… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“I knew a man who, in the age of chain-saws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as "the environment" -- that is, what surrounds us, we have already made a profound… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“That we can prescribe the terms of our own success, that we can live outside or in ignorance of the Great Economy are the… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“The mind that comes to rest is tended In ways that it cannot intend: Is borne, preserved, and comprehended By what it cannot comprehend.… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image