Quotes by : Christian Wiman

I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain....

When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this....

Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s....

Just as some of Jesus' first-century followers could not credit the presence of the risen Christ, so....

Mystical experience needs some form of dogma in order not to dissipate into moments of spiritual intensity....

The sick person becomes very adept at distinguishing between compassion and pity. Compassion is someone....

The temptation is to make an idol of our own experience, to assume our pain is more singular than it....

You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another,....

It is as if joy were the default setting of human emotion, not the furtive, fugitive glimpses it becomes....

What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that....