I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.

God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.

Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.

I'm drawn to this range, that's for sure, but I suppose the thing that most appeals to me about Mandelstam is the sense you get from every poem that everything - the poet's very soul - is at stake.

Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.

There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment. Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist.

What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.