“I did make up my mind at some time that instead of trying to serve my purposes by rhetorical artifice or personal attacks, I would try to make as much sense as I could. If your cause doesn’t make sense, why defend it? Writing is a test of sense. It’s an exposure of your ideas to your own scrutiny, and then to the scrutiny of other people.”

Further digging for quotes from Berry on writing turned up this excerpt from his essay The Joy of Sales Resistance, availible in his book Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community.

I am well aware that you cannot give your thoughts to someone who will not take them, and I am prepared for that. I would like to be agreed with, of course, but the rules of publication require me to be willing also to be disagreed with, to be ignored, and even to be disliked. Those who are moved by this book to disagreement or dislike will take discomfort, I hope, from hearing that some of my readers treat me kindly.

Kindness from readers is something that no essayist (and no writer of any other kind) has a right to expect. The kindness I have received from readers I count as the only profit from my work that is entirely net. I am always grateful for it and often am deeply moved by it.

But kindness is not—is never—the same as complete agreement. An essayist not only has no right to expect complete agreement but has a certain responsibility to ward it off. If you tell me, dear reader, that you agree with me completely, then I must suspect one or both of us of dishonesty. I must reserve the right, after all, to disagree with myself.

But however much I may change my mind, I will never agree with those saleswomen and salesmen who suggest that if I will only do as they say, all will be fine. All, dear reader, is not going to be fine. Even if we all agreed with all the saints and prophets, all would not be fine. For we would still be mortal, partial, suffering poor creatures, not very intelligent and never the authors of our best hope.

“Americans are never safe against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire. This is vanity. To be effective in the world, we need a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom, and power available to us and a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities.”

~ Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., paraphrasing Reinhold Niebuhr in the New York Times article, Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr.

“We think in language. And so the quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.”

To trust is simply to give oneself; the giving is for the future, for which there is no evidence. And once given, the self cannot be taken back, whatever the evidence.

~ Wendell Berry, Remembering

“It seemed to me that Christians were reading primarily for the experience of nodding agreement, “Yes, that’s true,” whereas great literature makes us stop and ponder: “I’ve never imagined it that way before”.”

Philip Yancey ~ Soul Survivor – How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church

“Good art gives us language to help us think about things that we understand but can’t always articulate.”

“We need to realize that we are called to follow God in the here and now on a pilgrimage of Eschatological Doxology. That is, a pilgrimage of longing, praise, and worship that is never complete.”

~ Lauren Winner

“The trouble with theology is that you have to say everything all the time, otherwise someone thinks you’re saying you don’t believe it.”

~ Steven Sikes, quoted by N.T. Wright during a lecture given at Yale.

“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.”

~ C.S. Lewis, On Stories