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

people poetry work divorce together apart connections

About Wendell Berry

Portrait of Wendell Berry

Wendell Erdman Berry (August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026) was 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...

More quotations from Wendell Berry

The miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine—which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.

—Wendell Berry

How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry—between, say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is accepted as a "trade-off.

—Wendell Berry

war destruction environmentalism capitalism industry

We're far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.

—Wendell Berry

Marriage is a perilous and fearful effort, it seems to me.… It creates pain that it is the only cure for. It is the only comfort for its hardships.… Though we had our troubles, we had them in a true perspective. The universe, as we could see any night, is unimaginably large, and mostly empty, and mostly dark. We knew we needed to be together more than we needed to be apart.

—Wendell Berry

fear perspective pain marriage comfort

Now you know the worst / we humans have to know / about ourselves, and I am sorry.

—Wendell Berry

More quotations tagged with “divorce”

Ever since I was a little kid, I've had trouble with transitions. I don't mean the usual life transitions of birth, death, divorce, moving—everyone has trouble with those. No, I mean the little transitions, like the one between waking up and putting my feet on the floor. Or between turning off the car and going into the house. Or between getting out of the shower and getting dressed. You can see why life has been very, very hard for me.

—Alison Luterman

life death birth divorce transitions moving

How many women, she wondered, had poisoned their husbands, not for gain or for another man, but out of sheer inability to leave them. The extreme solution is always the simplest. The weed killer is in the soup; the man is in his coffin.… Murder is more civilized than divorce; the Victorians, as usual, were wiser.

—Mary McCarthy

Our parents got divorced when we were kids, and it was kind of cool. We got to go to divorce court with them. It was like a game show. My mom won the house and car. We were all excited. My dad got some luggage.

perspective childhood divorce excitement separation

A bride at her second marriage does not wear a veil. She wants to see what she is getting.

—Helen Rowland

relationships marriage divorce wedding

However often marriage is dissolved, it remains indissoluble. Real divorce, the divorce of heart and nerve and fiber, does not exist, since there is no divorce from memory.

—Virginia Peterson

love memory marriage divorce

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31 Dec 2014 Added