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

I don’t believe in “laying to rest” the past. There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive.

I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity to endure and respond to the pain it forces you to feel. Psychological pain, I mean.

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

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

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

One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. It’s easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems—and to people—without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be.