Wendell Berry Quotes

When I was growing up, the place I felt least alone was when I was reading.

Anywhere which is in a forest, that's my zen place.

Going to the mountains is going home.

One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing else.

I now walk into the wild.

I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.

The only place I've felt was really my home is my cabin up north. There's something in the water there that connects me to that place. There's also this sense of isolation and loneliness about it that I've never been able to shake.

I took four years off after 'In the Cut' because I wanted to see who I'd be without work. I even tried being a hermit in the wilderness in New Zealand. I stayed in a warden's hut two-and-a-half hours off the Routeburn Track through the fjords on the South Island. It was early winter, so there was no electricity or running water.

In my deepest troubles, I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

People ask me where I go to get away, and I say 'Home.'

No phone. No pool. No pets. No cigarettes. Ultimate freedom... No longer to be poisoned by civilization, he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become Lost in the Wild.

I like writing in total isolation like out in the woods somewhere.

Come into the mountains, dear friend Leave society and take no one with you But your true self Get close to nature Your everyday games will be insignificant Notice the clouds spontaneously forming patterns And try to do that with your life.

I miss the woods. Sometimes I go on weekend trips and just wander the woods, barefoot and reminiscing, and I put my contact lenses in. Is that weird?

I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.

I'm up in the woods, I'm down on my mind. I'm building a still, to slow down the time.

When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.

Rise free from care before the dawn and seek adventure. Let the noon find you by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.

At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the windwaves close to the far bank. What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild.

Come to the woods, for here is rest.

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleance me in the great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home.

I long for scenes where man has never trod; A place where woman never smil'd or wept; There to abide with my creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept: Untroubling and untroubled where I lie; The grass below--above the vaulted sky.