We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.

At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent.

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

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.

We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.

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.

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