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

Art is so often better at theology than theology is.

Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.

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

To be truly alive is to feel one's ultimate existence within one's daily existence.

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

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

I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.

I find myself continually falling back into wounds, wishes, terrors I thought I had risen beyond.

I'm drawn to this range, that's for sure, but I suppose the thing that most appeals to me about Mandelstam is the sense you get from every poem that everything - the poet's very soul - is at stake.

Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.

All the energy of their frustration and fear going into their laughter.

With no one to fear him, it seemed at times as if he didn't exist at all.

I have yet to discover a source of information, practical advice, and hope that compares to the wisdom found in the Bible.

The unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent.

Meg and Belch only had eyes for each other. Not in the usual romantic sense.

I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity.

The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy, and envy.

The belief that life on earth arose spontaneously from nonliving matter, is simply a matter of faith in strict reductionism and is based entirely on ideology.

I think a little bit of competition is always good.

A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.