Fidelity Quotes

“The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship and then in mariage. My grandfather made a peace here that has joined many who would otherwise have been divided. I am the child of his forgiveness.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“But he learned what he had to, and he changed, and so he made himself exceptional.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“But, my dear boy, you don’t eat or drink the law, or sit in the shade of it or warm yourself by it, or wear it, or have your being in it. The law exists only to serve.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“When they returned on yet another visit and found the old body still as it had been, a mere passive addition to the complicated machines that kept it minimally alive, they saw finally that in their attempt to help they had not helped but only complicated his disease beyond their power to help. And they thought with regret of the time when the thing that was wrong with him had been simply unknown, and there had been only it and him and him and them in the place they had known together. Loving him, wanting to help him, they had given him over to “the best of modern medical care”—which meant, as they now saw, that they had abandoned him.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“And yet in Port William, as everywhere else, it was already the second decade of the twentieth century. And in some of the people of the town and the community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace else.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“He could see. And he walked along, feeling the joy of a man who sees, a joy that a man tends to forget in sufficient light.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father's dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“She thought it strange and wonderful that she had been given all these to love She thought it a blessing that she had loved them to the limit of her grief at parting with them, and that grief had only deepened and clarified her love. Since her first grief had brought her fully to birth and wakefulness in this world, an unstinting compassion had moved in her, like a live stream flowing deep underground, by which she knew herself and other and the world. It was her truest self, that stream always astir inside her that was at once pity and love, knowledge and faith, forgiveness, grief, and joy. It made her fearful, and it made her unafraid.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“Tell you,” he said, “there ain’t a way in this world to know what a human creature is going to do next.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“Mat knelt there with his father's dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“He stepped forward and knelt and took his father's wrist in his hand to feel for the pulse that he did not expect, having seen the wound and the fixed unsighted eyes.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“Danny’s mother, Kate Helen Branch, had been the love of Burley Coulter’s life. They were careless lovers, those two, and Danny came as a surprise—albeit a far greater surprise to Burley than to Kate Helen. Danny was born to his mother’s name, a certified branch of the Branches, and he grew up in the care of his mother and his mother’s mother in a small tin-roofed, paper-sided house on an abandoned corner of Thad Spellman’s farm, not far from town by a shortcut up through the woods. As the sole child in that womanly household,”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“That she was his half, she had no doubt at all. He needed her. At times she knew with a joyous ache that she completed him, just as she knew with the same joy that she needed him and he completed her. How beautiful a thing it was, she thought, to be a half, to be completed by such another half! When had there ever been such a yearning of halves toward each other, such a longing, even in quarrels, to be whole? And sometimes they would be whole. Their wholeness came upon them as a rush of light, around them and within them, so that she felt they must be shining in the dark.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“When my grandfather was dying, I was not thinking about the past. My grandfather was still a man I knew, but as he subsided day by day he was ceasing to be the man I had known. I was experiencing consciously for the first time that transformation in which the living, by dying, pass into the living, and I was full of grief and love and wonder. And so when I”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories

“The man of whom I once was pleased to say, “He is my grandfather,” has become the dead man who was my grandfather. He was, and is no more. And this is a part of the great mystery we call time.”
― Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories