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Quote by Christian Wiman

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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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“I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It's the discipline of preparedness.”

WorldWritingKindMayFactsAbleCertainHoursPossibilityDisciplineEndureIncludingRefusePracticalsProseIndolencePreparednessHavocTime Poetry
Author:Christian Wiman
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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.”

GivingPersonsUseSeemsMightPainSpiritualFormCultureCan DoLossEmotionalDrugShapesDespairPsychologicalUselessDimensionsPoetry IsHopelessHauntingEmotional PainPhysical Pain
Author:Christian Wiman
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“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.”

PeoplePersonsWantedReadingEasyQualityEssentialsCapacitySurpriseNotionBe GoodLikesPoetry IsDislikeRecallsPreconceived NotionsReading Poetry
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“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.”

WorldFeelsKindFeelingsHomeForceDifficultAnxietyAmbitionExplanationIsolationFuelSecularNever Quit
Author:Christian Wiman
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