1Wendell Berry Quotes: Hannah Coulter The Feltner place had been in the family a long timesince the

first white people settled here. Virgil had taken his place, after his father, in the line of those who were gone and those who were to come. It was something I needed to get into my mind. The love he bore to me was his own, but also it was a love that had been borne to him, by people he knew, people I now knew, people he loved. 33 To be in love with virgil was to be there, in love, with his parents, his family, his place, his baby. 50 But he wanted more than me. He wanted a life for us to live and a place for us to live inHe wasnt going anywhere. He had come back home after the war because he wanted to. He was where he wanted to be. As I too was by then, he was a member of Port William. Members of Port William arent trying to get someplace. They think they are someplace. 67 Nathan and I turned from the war and saw the future shining before us. The future we faced was no more than the old Cuthbert place, but it shone before us 73 A lifetimes knowledge shimmers oin the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it, walking over it, and is never fully handed on to anybody else, but has been mostly lost, generation after generation, going back and back to the first Indians. And now the history of Nathans and my life here is fading away. When I am gone, it too will be mostly gone. 82 Most people now are looking for a better place, which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and at the warThere is no better place than this, not in this world. And it is by the place weve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to heaven. 83 It is like putting your foot in your own shoe. Familiar. A comfort. I see the place itself, as it is, and I see all that we have doene here, our long passing over the fields that was our living and our life. 83 Speaking of their love of their children: And here is where our love for them was made. Love in this world doesnt come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselces, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place. 88 By our work the place gave us back our life. The children knew this. For a long time

thiswas the knowledhe they most belonged to. also foreshadows their leaving 89 We had to get used to our house. We had to get used to our place. It takes years, maybe it takes longer than a lifetime, to know a place, especially if you are getting to know it as a place to live and work, and you are getting to know it by living and working in it. 91 My children were born into that story, and into the membership that the story is about, and into the place that was home to the membership, and home to them as long as they wanted such a home. We brought them up, teaching then as well as we could the things the place woulc require them to know if they stayed. And yet, like Netty and Aunt Fanny, they chose to go. 95 The making of the place was the thing that ruled over everything else, for we were living from that place As the years passed and our life changed, the place changed. It emerged, you might say, from what it had been into what we needed and wanted it to be, never perfect of course, but always a little better. It came under the influence of what we foresaw in it, and of our ways of using it and going about it. 106 On education and home: It just never occurred to either of us that we would lose them that way. The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our childrens education. The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you arebut a better place somewhere else. 112 What I had in my mind, God help me, was the thought that some day Virgie might qant the place for himself, and would come there and fix the house up and renew it and live in it with a wife and children, and would bring the old memories home again, and give them a proper dwelling place. 139 And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence. But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remembered now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream present with you in the present, alive with you in the onlu time you are alive. 148 Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed 168 By the ones who have moved away, as many have done, as my children have done, the dead may be easily forgotten. But to those who remain, the place is forever a reminder. And so the absent come to into the present. 180

Jayber Crow 11 ; On naming: thus I became, and have remained, a possession of the town. 12: memories of place gone: connected to the places of the house 16: I began to feel at home connected with the seasons of squires landing 18: The river was a barrier and yet a connection. 24: memory: I see that my life is almost entirely memory Finally, I fully accepted that one day I belong entirely to memory 36: on the Good Shepard School: After I quit waking up afraid, feeling that I might be nowhere, I began getting used to the place. I began to take for granted that I was somewhere that I knew, but I never quite felt that I was somewhere I wanted to be. Where I wanted to be, always, day in and day out, year in and year out, was squires landing and all that contry between Port William up on the ridge and the river When I heard or read the word home, that patch of country was what I thought of. Home was one of the words I wrote in my tablet. 37: The things I was remembering were gone from everywhere except my mind. 71: all the institutions I knew were islands (he has another earlier on on institutions and neighbors 126: Listening to old men They were rememberers, carryingin their living thoughts all the history that such places such as Port William ever had. 130: Commitment: Iknewnothing would be simple for me again. I never again would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away 143: on the war: No more can I think of Port William and the United States in the same thought. A nation is an idea, and Port William is not. Maybe there is not connection between a little place and a big idea. I think there is not. 144: Machines and displacement: Did the machines displace the people from the farms, or were the machines drawn onto the farms because the people already were leaving to take up a wagework in factories and the building trades and such? Both, I think. 205: What I came to know (by feeling only) was that the places true being, its presence you might say, was a sort of current, like an underground flow of water, except that the flowing was in all directions and did not yet flow away. When it rose into your heart and throat, you felt joy and sorrow at the same time, and the joining of times and lives. To come into the presence of life was to know life and death, and to be near in all your thoughts to laughter and tears. This would come over you and then pass away as fragile as a moment of light 230 as much as you will let it, port Williams will trouble your heart 281: the interstate and disruption, boundaries, etc 298: to feel at home in a place, you have to have some prospect of staying there. 360: mattie as the places protector: timber enframing (the nest egg)