More Wendell Berry

From The Pleasures of Eating

"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."


I realize this blog has become just quotes that I really like.

I am okay with that.

In a mood

I've only been at work for 14 minutes and I'm already in a bad mood. I feel sicky and tired and bored and lots of other things as well. I'll just post Wendell Berry quotes and look at pictures of kittens.

"We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities."

"Never forget: We are alive within mysteries."

"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."

"In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known. "

"Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable.
Be joyfulthough you have considered all the facts."

Thanks Mr. Berry

I just read my first Wendell Berry book and I still have a bit of that literary glow.

You know, when you've read the right kind of book. The kind of book that makes you want to settle down and think about the future. Flip through the pages you just read just so you don't have to turn out the light and go to sleep. Yes, Wendell Berry, if Facebook was slightly more Book and much less Face we would currently be "in a relationship." There have been other authors I've been a little more "complicated" with (Sorry Mr. Capote, I just don't think I'm what you're looking for!), but right now it's all about the Wendster. How can you not love a man who says something like this?

“When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be -- I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”