Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting.… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
The endless, useless urge to look on life comprehensively, to take a bird's-eye view of ourselves and judge the dimensions of what we have or have not done: this is life as landscape, or life as résumé. But life is… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
I find myself continually falling back into wounds, wishes, terrors I thought I had risen beyond. — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“Intellectuals and artists concerned with faith tend to underestimate the radical, inviolable innocence it requires. We read and read, write long, elaborate essays and… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations. — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“Let us remember...that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
To be truly alive is to feel one's ultimate existence within one's daily existence. — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God,… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“How many loves fail because, in an unconscious effort to make our weaknesses more strong, we link with others precisely at those points? How… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“It is a strange thing how sometimes merely to talk honestly of God, even if it is only to articulate our feelings of separation… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“Faith cannot save you from the claims of reason, except insofar as it preserves and protects that wonderful, terrible time when reason, if only… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
