Famous Quotes from Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry quote #380 from Jayber Crow

By then I wasnt just asking questions I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence which werent confrontations with God but with the difficulty--in my own mind or in the human lot--of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night I could feel myself being changed--into what I had no idea.
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Wendell Berry quote #442 from Given

Ive come down from the skylike some damned ghost delayedtoo longTo the abandoned fieldsthe trees returned and grew.They stand and grow. Time comesTo them time goes the treesStand the only placeThey go is where they are.Those wholly patient onesThey do no wrong and theyAre beautiful. What moreCould we have thought to ask...I stand and wait for lightto open the dark night.I stand and wait for prayerto come and find me here. Sabbaths 2000 IX
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Wendell Berry quote #290 from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.If on the other hand we believe that we are living souls Gods dust and Gods breath acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves and if we understand that we are free within the obvious limits of moral human life to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free then all of us are artists. All of us are makers within mortal terms and limits of our lives of one anothers lives of things we need and use...If we think of ourselves as living souls immortal creatures living in the midst of a Creation that is mostly mysterious and if we see that everything we make or do cannot help but have an everlasting significance for ourselves for others and for the world then we see why some religious teachers have understood work as a form of prayer...Work connects us both to Creation and to eternity. pg. 316 Christianity and the Survival of Creation
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Wendell Berry quote #127 from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

The two ideas justice and vocation are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that to work is to pray. pg. 258 The Idea of a Local Economy
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