How It Went Quotes

“Don’t think of the dollar, think of the job,” he would say, meaning that if you kept your mind on your work and did it right, maybe you wouldn’t need to worry about the dollar.”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“Those Sunday afternoon conversations in my father’s automobile, which were and are so dear to me, were powered by oil and fire, and were more ominous than we could then have known. And yet, convergent as it was upon the time to come, that conversation was an inheritance. It descended to us from Grandpa Catlett, a somewhat tragic figure, lonely in his marriage, the last of those we called “the old kind,” who stood behind us even as we departed from him. We would never know again in our country a man so intact, so fully incarnate as he was, who had never enlarged himself by a power that he had not spoken to and been heard by.”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“In the recovered light of his watching across so many years, Andy is pleased and reassured to see the two of them merely standing together, standing still, looking silently out into the world and the weather: an old black man with a gray mustache, wearing a work jacket tattered and faded and a similarly historical felt hat, and, no more than a foot from him and exactly beside him, a small white boy in a too-big purple coat, with a face as unguarded, as unmade, as his life still is. Only his quietness and his closeness to the old man tell of his happiness in being where he is. They stand still, the two of them, looking out the door as if to memorize the color of the air.”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“It seemed sure at least that Dick was more complete than almost everybody Andy would know in the times to come, and the proof simply was that he worked without hurry and did not dawdle. By being skilled and therefore unhurried and beautiful, his work enabled him to live and to last, but also to be pleased, which enabled him to live and to last. And”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“The sign and signature of the beauty of Dick’s work was that he did not hurry and did not dawdle. He worked at ease. This was a time when it was possible for a lot of people in that country to put their hands to work that was beautiful, and the beauty of their work was of the same kind as all other beauty, leading into time and out of it.”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“And so Andy was feeling what he could not yet know, but what in his old age, looking back in his tenderness upon that day, he completely knows. While he was there with Dick and the team of mules, trying his poor best to learn a skill and a patience already doomed, he was beginning to awaken in the rift rapidly widening between worlds of two different kinds. One was the world of town and school and automobility, a world forever tilted toward the future that would be always arriving and would never arrive, in which a man like Uncle Andrew could come to rest only by dying. The other world was the one that Andy at that moment stood in, which at that moment was still intact around him. There would be a few more moments and days yet in which he would know its coherence, but it was a world, as he would learn to see, that he had been born barely in time to know, and where for just a little while it still could be known. Maybe it was a foretaste of a dividing of time that caused Andy to say almost to his surprise, “Dick, if I didn’t have to go to school, I could live out here and work with you every day. Wouldn’t that be good?” Dick laughed his laugh of grownup responsibility. “Ho ho ho, now no, buddy. You got to keep in school.” But now that he had heard himself speak his wish, Andy could not easily give it up. “I don’t like it. If they didn’t make me, I wouldn’t go.”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“At his age then he was in a hurry to get from the past into the future, and even in overshoes his feet were light.”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“He would then have been just about nine and a half years old, a count he would have been keeping, for he longed to be ten and to write his age in two numbers.”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“He is often given to the thought of subtraction, of what has been given, what taken, what remains.”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“When your neighbor needs help, go help. When neighbors work together, nobody’s done until everybody’s done.”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“1 — Be happy with what you’ve got. Don’t be always looking for something better. 2 — Don’t buy anything you don’t need. 3 — Don’t buy what you ought to save. Don’t buy what you ought to make. 4 — Unless you absolutely have got to do it, don’t buy anything new. 5 — If somebody tries to sell you something to “save labor,” look out. If you can work, then work. 6 — If other people want to buy a lot of new stuff and fill up the country with junk, use the junk. 7 — Some good things are cheap, even free. Use them first. 8 — Keep watch for what nobody wants. 9 — You might know, or find out, what it is to need help. So help people.”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“On one of those wanderings far from home, and almost suddenly, he became able again to see past himself, beyond and around himself.”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“strange when he began again to move. When the fox, having seen as much as it needed or wanted to see, vanished quickly but all the same unfrightened and without haste, Andy felt curiously complimented, as if the fox had agreed to his presence in the woods.”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

“so”
― Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership