Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
Wendell E. Berryis 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth5 August 1934
CityHenry County, KY
CountryUnited States of America
The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.
It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.
Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare.
We live the given life, and not the planned.
I'd rather rely on mother nature's wisdom than man's cleverness
A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.
One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the gospels without feeling that something is amiss.
It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.
There are, it seems, two muses: The Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, 'It is yet more difficult than you thought.' It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled, is unemployed
We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.