Verdell Berry Quotes

Under the twinkling trees was a table covered with Guatemalan fabric, roses in juice jars, wax rose candles from Tijuana and plates of food - Weetzie's Vegetable Love-Rice, My Secret Agent Lover Man's guacamole, Dirk's homemade pizza, Duck's fig and berry salad and Surfer Surprise Protein Punch, Brandy-Lynn's pink macaroni, Coyote's cornmeal cakes, Ping's mushu plum crepes and Valentine's Jamaican plantain pie. Witch Baby's stomach growled but she didn't leave her hiding place. Instead, she listened to the reggae, surf, soul and salsa, tugged at the snarl balls in her hair and snapped pictures of all the couples. ~ Francesca Lia Block

The first step is clearly defining what it is you're after, because without knowing that, you'll never get it. ~ Halle Berry

Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt: it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that creams the sumac-berry. One has no time to examine the word and vote upon its rank and standing, the automatic recognition of its supremacy is so immediate. ~ Mark Twain

All human activities, professions, programs, and institutions must henceforth be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually enhancing human/Earth relationship. ~ Thomas Berry

Don't take yourself too seriously. Know when to laugh at yourself, and find a way to laugh at obstacles that inevitably present themselves. ~ Halle Berry

Before you go alter body, do some research and find out how many women have major life-threatening complications from nose jobs. Ask about how many nose jobs gone terribly wrong, and if you thought your face was wrong before, look what happens after. The more we start augmenting our bodies, the more and more we start to look alike, then nobody is special anymore. ~ Halle Berry

You have taken me and quieted me.
You have been such light to me that others have been your shadows.
You come near me with the nearness of sleep.

--"Marriage", Wendell Berry ~ Wendell Berry

Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst, we cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundance it survives our thirst. In the evening we come down to the shore to drink our fill, and sleep, while it flows through the regions of the dark. It does not hold us, except we keep returning to its rich waters thirsty. We enter, willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy. ~ Wendell Berry

When a young woman tells me that she wants to become and actor, I say, 'No, be a writer. Or go to business school and learn how to run a studio.' The only real change will come from behind the scenes. ~ Halle Berry

Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life. ~ Wendell Berry

Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! My darling!
Light goes the weather-wind and the feathered starling.
Down along under the Hill, shining in the sunlight,
Waiting on the doorstep for the cold starlight,
There my pretty lady is, River-woman's daughter,
Slender as the willow-wand, clearer than the water.
Old Tom Bombadil water-lilies bringing
Comes hopping home again. Can you hear him singing?
Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! and merry-o,
Goldberry, Goldberry, merry yellow berry-o!
Poor old Willow-man, you tuck your roots away!
Tom's in a hurry now. Evening will follow day.
Tom'sgoing hom again water lilies-bringing.
Hey! Come derry dol! Can you hear me singing? ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Communists and capitalists alike, "liberal" and "conservative" capitalists alike, have needed to replace religion with some form of determinism, so that they can say to their victims, "I am doing this because I can't do otherwise. It is not my fault. It is inevitable." The wonder is how often organized religion has gone along with this lie. ~ Wendell Berry

It is not, I think, a question of when and how the white people will "free" the black and the red people. It is a condescension to believe that we have the power to do that. Until we have recognized in them the full strength and grace of their distinctive humanity we will be able to set no one free, for we will not be free ourselves. When we realize that they possess a knowledge for the lack of which we are incomplete and in pain, then the wound in our history will be healed. Then they will simply be free, among us
and so will we, among ourselves for the first time, and among them. ~ Wendell Berry

The conventional public opposition of 'liberal' and 'conservative' is, here as elsewhere, perfectly useless. The 'conservatives' promote the family as a sort of public icon, but they will not promote the economic integrity of the household or the community, which are the mainstays of family life. Under the sponsorship of 'conservative' presidencies, the economy of the modern household, which once required the father to work away from home - a development that was bad enough - now requires the mother to work away from home, as well. And this development has the wholehearted endorsement of 'liberals,' who see the mother thus forced to spend her days away from her home and children as 'liberated' - though nobody has yet seen the fathers thus forced away as 'liberated.' Some feminists are thus in the curious position of opposing the mistreatment of women and yet advocating their participation in an economy in which everything is mistreated. ~ Wendell Berry

Generalizations, one is told, are dangerous. So is life, for that matter, and it is built up on generalization - from the earliest effort of the adventurer who dared to eat a second berry because the first had not killed him. ~ Freya Stark

There is a religious principle: Love thy neighbour as thyself. But it's also an economic asset. If you've got a neighbour, you've got help, and this implies another limit. If you want to have neighbours, you can't have a limitless growth economy. You have to prefer to have a neighbour rather than to own your neighbour farm. ~ Wendell Berry

I learned long ago that no matter how much you loathe a past love, some small piece of you will always belong to them. ~ B.L. Berry

I've never been afraid to be who I really am on screen. ~ Halle Berry

And what of failure?"
He shrugged."The consequence of not succeesing.Remember what Homer said.Circumstances rule men,not men circumstances. ~ Steve Berry

We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be. ~ Wendell Berry

Prejudice doesn't make me mad. It just - I guess 'pisses me off' is the word. ~ Chuck Berry

Coo, coo." Constable Quill looked, for a moment, like a man regretting his choice of profession, but he plowed onward. "And you say you heard someone cooing in your back garden on Sunday night? ~ Julie Berry

There is a great book out called 'Everything I Needed to Learn I Learned in Kindergarten,' and I believe that everything I ever needed to learn on guitar was in my first two years of hungry learning: Scotty Moore, Hank Marvin, Chet Atkins, Lenny Breau, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. ~ Randy Bachman

If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk. ~ Wendell Berry

The "environmental crisis," in fact, can be
solved only if people, individually and in their communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies. If people begin the effort to take back into their own power a significant portion of their economic responsibility, then their inevitable first discovery is that the "environmental crisis" is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an "environmental crisis" because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, the god-given world. ~ Wendell Berry

Riley might've been more appreciative had he had any idea what was going on. He tried to rouse himself, find out specifics, but his head was throbbing - or maybe that was his brain; he could've sworn it was about to go pop like an overripe berry under a truck tire ... ~ J. Fally

In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world. ~ Wendell Berry

If you're of multiple races, you have a different challenge, a unique challenge of embracing all of who you are but still finding a way to identify yourself and I think that's often hard for us to do. ~ Halle Berry

The human venture depends absolutely on this quality of awe and reverence and joy in the Earth and all that lives and grows upon the Earth. As soon as we isolate ourselves from these currents of life and from the profound mood that these engender within us, then our basic life-satisfactions are diminished. None of our machine-made products, none of our computer-based achievements can evoke that total commitment to life. ~ Thomas Berry

Berry Gordy believed in owning the artist for life and controlling everything: the money, the station wagons, everything. ~ Wilson Pickett

We don't need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of enmity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of indifference would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our desire to kill one another-that surely would be to have life more abundantly. ~ Wendell Berry

But heroes, at times, had to be fools. ~ Steve Berry

However interesting and lovely my days were, I could get from one day to the next only by passing through a night. I have, it is true, known lovely nights here; nights of sound sleep and good dreams and nights made wakeful by happy thoughts. but I have not always been a good sleeper, and my thoughts at night have sometimes been far from happy. ~ Wendell Berry

Woe to he who checkmates his opponents at last, only to discover they have been playing cribbage. ~ Jedediah Berry

If you are already solving your problem with the equipment you have - a pencil, say- why solve it with something more expensive and more damaging? If you don't have a problem, why pay for a solution? If you love the freedom and elegance of simple toons, why encumber yourself with something complicated?
And yet, if we are ever again going to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to 'need'. ~ Wendell Berry

... To remember,
to hear and remember, is to stop
and walk on again
to a livelier, surer measure.
It is dangerous
to remember the past only
for its own sake, dangerous
to deliver a message
you did not get. ~ Wendell Berry

I get offered varied parts, often super sexy roles. But I still think it's an issue to find the good scripts. It's a myth that you win an Oscar and you get more opportunities, and this doesn't just go for me. ~ Halle Berry

I think a smart person today realizes that you have to be part of the art films that are done just for the sake of the art. ~ Halle Berry

Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,
Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,
and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before. ~ Wendell Berry