Art is so often better at theology than theology is.

Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam.

Mandelstam - his gift and the untamable nature of it - was like a thorn in Stalin's brain.

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 incremental, and though a worthwhile life is a gathering together of all that one is, good and bad, successful and not, the paradox is that we can never really see this one thing that all of our increments (and decrements, I suppose) add up to.

I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of mind.

Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.

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