War & Peace Quote by Wendell Berry

"I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free"

Wendell Berry, Poet

About this Quote

Berry’s genius here is the way he frames escape as a kind of return: not to a fantasy, but to an older, nonverbal order where panic doesn’t get to run the show. “I come into the peace of wild things” is both confession and method. The speaker isn’t chasing joy; he’s seeking asylum from a very specific modern affliction: the mind’s compulsion to pre-live disaster. That phrase “tax their lives with forethought of grief” is a small act of moral indictment. Forethought becomes a levy, a bureaucratic extraction paid in sleep and steadiness. Wildness, by contrast, is figured as a model of attention without anxiety - not ignorance, but unburdened presence.

The subtext is political in Berry’s quiet, agrarian way. This isn’t wilderness as aesthetic backdrop; it’s an alternative value system to industrial time, where everything is forecasted, optimized, insured, and monetized. In that world, even sorrow gets pre-accounted. Berry refuses it by rehearsing a different rhythm: enter, rest, be free. “For a time” is doing crucial work: the poem doesn’t promise permanent cure, only a temporary reprieve that’s still meaningful because it restores proportion. Grace isn’t earned here; it’s ambient. “The grace of the world” suggests an economy that doesn’t keep score, where relief arrives not through self-improvement but through surrendering the fantasy of control.

Context matters: Berry wrote as a farmer-poet skeptical of American progress narratives. The line reads like an antidote to mid-to-late 20th-century acceleration, and it lands even harder now, in an age of doomscrolling and predictive dread.

Quote Details

Topic	Nature
Source	Verified source: Openings (Wendell Berry, 1968) Text match: 95.00% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. (Page 32). This is from Wendell Berry's poem "The Peace of Wild Things." The earliest primary-source publication I could verify is Berry's poetry collection Openings, first edition, published in New York by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1968. WorldCat confirms the 1968 first edition. A Google Books snippet from an anthology reproducing the poem places it on page 32, and Google Books also indexes the closing lines as appearing in books from 1968 onward, which is consistent with Openings being the first book publication. I did not find evidence that it was first spoken in a speech or interview; it appears to originate as a poem in Berry's own published work. Other candidates (1) the Ultimate Book of Quotations (Joseph Demakis, 2012) compilation98.1% ... I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in...
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