Wendell Berry
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"Wendell Berry" is an American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. A prolific author, he has written dozens of novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences/The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry has been named the recipient of the 2013 Dayton Literary Peace Prize/Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.

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To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

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The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

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In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.

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

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I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

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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.

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We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?

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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

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