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“[People] use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | Racism and the Economy p.61

“The Indian became a redskin, not by loss in battle, but by accepting a dependence on traders that made necessities of industrial goods. This is not merely history. It is a parable.”

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | The Unsettling of America p.38

“It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.”

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | A Native Hill p.29

“Too much that we do is done at the expense of something else, or somebody else. There is some intransigent destructiveness in us.”

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | A Native Hill p.28

“[Adorn even] the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever.”

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | A Native Hill p. 28

“Man ought to study the wilderness of a place before applying to it the ways he learned in another place.”

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | A Native Hill p.26

“The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enter its future.”

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | A Native Hill p.25