Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon the rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other.

—Wendell Berry

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About Wendell Berry

Portrait of Wendell Berry

Wendell Erdman Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of The Gift of Good Land (1981) and The Unsettling of America (1977). His attention...

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Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts.

—Wendell Berry

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As long as there are some people who wish to believe . . . that they are too good to do their own work and clean up after themselves, then somebody else is going to have to do the work and the cleaning up. . . . If some people grow rich by making things to throw away, then many other people will have to empty the garbage cans and make the trip to the dump.

—Wendell Berry

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Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

—Wendell Berry

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We haven't accepted — we can't really believe — that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so. And we still think and behave as though we face an unspoiled continent, with thousands of acres of living space for every man. We still sing "America the Beautiful" as though we had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an unprecedented ugliness.

—Wendell Berry

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This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can't put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing that you can do: you take two things that ought to be together and you put them back together. Two things, not all things! That's the way the work has to go. You make connections in your work… That's what we do, we people who make things. If it's a stool or a film or a poem or an essay or a novel or a musical composition, it's all about that. Finding how it fits together and fitting it together.

—Wendell Berry

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