April 18th, 2006 | Published in Agrarianism, Community, Quotes
“To be parted from your house, your father’s house—it oughtn’t to be allowed. It is worse than dying. I would rather die than—Oh, poor girls! Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn’t die in the room where they were born?” [Mrs. Wilcox]
–E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), p. 70
April 11th, 2006 | Published in Community, Quotes, Religion, Work
How can you love your neighbor if you don’t know how to build or mend a fence, how to keep your filth out of his water supply and your poison out of his air; or if you do not produce anything and so have nothing to offer, or do not take care of yourself and so become a burden? How can you be a neighbor without applying principle—without bringing virtue to a practical issue? How will you practice virtue without skill?
—Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 299
April 10th, 2006 | Published in Agrarianism, Community, Ecology, Quotes
The 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.
—Wendell Berry, “The Use of Energy,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 285