“For it has been our history that each generation in this place has been less welcome to it than the last. There has been less here for them. At each arrival there has been less fertility in the soil, and a larger inheritance of destructive precedent and shameful history.”
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | A Native Hill p.8
“The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly – an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a “practical” point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.”
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | A Native Hill p.11
“There is indeed a music in the streams, but it is not for the hurried.”
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | A Native Hill p. 19
“A year ago, almost in this same place where I found his beer can, I found a possum that he had shot dead and left lying, in celebration of his manhood. He is the true American pioneer, perfectly at rest in his assumption that he is the first and the last whose inheritance and fate this place will ever be. Going forth, as he may think, to sow, he only broadcasts his effects.”
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | A Native Hill p.20
Turkey Alwan Travels