Christian Wiman Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Christian Wiman
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.

Christian Wiman
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.

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

Christian Wiman
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.

Christian Wiman