Quote

Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.

Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Firsts
Challenges
Familiar
Nagging
First
Alone
Ancient
Bond
Going
Bigs
Ground
Dread
Always
Fear
Step
Wilderness
Feelings
Along
Excitement
Place
Steps
Unknown
Littles
Leave
Curiosity
Little
Risk
Woods

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.
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You can't know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction
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We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
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The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you.
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Our model citizen is a sophisticate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato
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You can't live entirely alone. You have to have some kind of a support system.
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The law is meant to work for justice. But people who know themselves know that, at some point, justice had better be mitigated by mercy. And you don't get to mercy by a legal principle. You get to mercy by way of imagination, sympathy, tenderness of heart - which are not weaknesses.
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Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.
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...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.
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Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.
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The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.
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The presence of the present has become insistent, undeniable, and I dare not look away.
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The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.
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We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
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The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
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In losing stewardship we lose fellowship we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.
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The Christian gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.
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We can fight the global economy with a strong local economy.
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The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.
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It is understood that nonhuman creatures adapt to their places or they don't live. And for some reason that I can't figure out, even the biologists have excused our own species from that obligation. I think there's going to be a biological penalty to be paid for that eventually.
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