The Wild Birds Quotes

“The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”
― Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership

“He does not forget—it has been a long time since he has been able to forget—that he is making his stand in the middle of a dying town in the midst of a wasting country, from which many have departed and much has been sent away, a land wasting and dying for want of the human names and knowledge that could give it life.”
― Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership

“How many times in the last twenty years has Wheeler risen to speak, to realize that the speech he has prepared is a defense of the dead and the absent, and he is pleading with strangers for a hope that, he is afraid, has no chance?”
― Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership

“He has never learned anything until he has had to—as he willingly says, as perhaps is so—but he has had to learn a good deal.”
― Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership

“The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't." Burley Coulter”
― Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership

“he patiently tolerated as much of him as he thought tolerable. The rest he ignored.”
― Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership

“She cared for him without hope, because she had passed the place of turning back or looking back. Quietly, almost submissively, she propped herself against him, because in her fate and faith she was opposed to his ruin.”
― Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership