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.

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

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

Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.

Consequences lost all purchase when they became mad. And desperation, when pressed beyond anguish, became narcotic.

Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.

In seventeen of His thirty-seven parables, Jesus dealt with property and man's responsibility for using it wisely.

Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry.

Needs are the expression of life through us.

The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be 'eclectic.'

As o'er the stormy sea of human Life We sail, until our anchor'd spirits rest In the far haven of Eternity.

People in the future look back on primitive machinery or technology or painting, and in some ways, it always seems amazingly intricate and finely wrought.

It's not good to argue with your woman about something, because women feel strong about it, they slap you in your face, you still go back to them.

Sometimes a book isn't a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Sometimes it's the only story you know how to tell.