Quotes about Connection

A music attends the things of the earth. To sense that music is to be near the possibility of health and joy.

Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love. Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life.

The environment," as we call it, is intimately with us. We're in it. It's in us. But also we are it, and it is us.

The survivors of the old life come to pay their respects. The neighbors, old and young, come. People who have moved away, maybe a long time ago, come back. You see people you knew when you were young and now don't recognize, people who may never come back again, people you may never see again. We feel the old fabric torn, pulling apart, and we know how much we have loved each other.

She was another gift, surely, to us all. She was a happiness that made me cry.

But this is not the story of a life. It is the story of lives, knit together, overlapping in succession, rising again from grave after grave.

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

All women is brothers,' Burley Coulter used to say, and then look at you with a dead sober look as if he didn't know why you thought that was funny. But, as usual, he was telling the truth. Or part of it.

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up from the pages of books and from your own heart. Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields. There are songs and sayings that belong to this place, by which it speaks for itself and no other.

If you see the world's goodness and beauty, and if you love your own place in it (no deed required), then your love itself will be one of your life's great rewards.

He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: "boomers" and "stickers." Boomers, he said, are "those who pillage and run," who want "to make a killing and end up on Easy Street," whereas stickers are "those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.

To feel at home in a place, you have to have some prospect of staying there.