The Memory of Old Jack
Wendell Berry
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The work satisfied something deeper in him than his own desire. It was as if he went to his fields in the spring, not just because he wanted to, but because his father and grandfather before him had gone because they wanted to - because, since the first seeds were planted by hand in the ground, his kinsmen had gone each spring to the fields. When he stepped into the first opening furrow of a new season he was not merely fulfilling an economic necessity; he was answering the summons of an immemorial kinship; he was shaping a passage by which an ancient vision might pass once again into the ground.”
“Now when he walked in his fields and pastures and woodlands he was tramping into his mind the shape of the land, his thought becoming indistinguishable from it, so that when he came to die his intelligence would subside into it like its own spirit.”
“The modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing that cannot be proved, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.”
“turning away from the house, from the losses and failures and confinements of his history, to the land, the woods and fields of the old farm, in which he already sensed an endlessly abounding and unfolding promise.”
“Used as he is to the expansive labor of the fields, he is enjoying the smallness and neatness of this task.”
“The sermon is merely a presence, a distant drone among the humming and singing that the air is already full of, borne away on the fragrance that draws through the windows.”
“The modern ignorance is in people’s assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing it cannot prove, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.”
“Sitting there, eyes shut, head tilted back, hands at rest upon his cane's crook, he seems to sink immeasurably, to float down into a well of light as warm and red as blood. He has met the sun at its entrance to the earth, where it is blooded and then darkened. It burns away the shadow and ash of the flesh of his old age, and he lives again, light and strong, in his mind. And now, as if out of an old history living in his hands returns to him the presence and the touch of her who loved him as he was.”
“She mourns for the future, as the past has taught her. And yet there is a rejoicing in her, persistent and unbidden as the beating of her heart.”
“Or rather that crisp command fell upon the current of his thought like a dry leaf on the surface of a deeply flowing stream, to be borne forty years away.”
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Book Keywords:
life-lessons, aging, love, faith, children, future-quotations, mindfulness, anxiety, arrogance-of-the-modern, land, memory, hope, ignorance
