Wendell BerryThinkers

The Agrarian mind is an attitude interested in local rather than larger questions, it is forever fascinated by questions leading toward the accomplishment of good work. What is the best location for a particular building or fence' What is the best way to plow this field' What is the best course for a skid road in this woodland' Should this tree here be cut down'.

Breastfeeding is a feeling of growing slowly empty, as if in the presence of that long flow of love even grief could not stand.

A Community is a commonwealth: A place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.

Death is far more terrible for the heart as one death wholly imagined than a thousand deaths in war.

Eating is an agricultural act.

Healing is impossible in loneliness... it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of creation.

Life is conducted beyond words, as also one lives beyond computation and beyond theory.

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.

The Past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

Soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.