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Quote by Christian Wiman

Work

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

This book delves into the personal journey of a modern individual grappling with the complexities of belief and spirituality. The author reflects on the intersection of faith and contemporary life, offering insights into the challenges and questions that arise in the context of modern society. more

Author

Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman

Christian Wiman, born in 1966, is a renowned American poet known for his profound religious reflections and unique poetic style. His works have won him widespread acclaim from readers and critics. more

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“Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.”

“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.”

“There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.”