Daniel Romo > Daniel's Quotes

“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.”
― Christian Wiman, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet

“Let us remember...that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”
― Christian Wiman

“Art is so often better at theology than theology is.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“All love abhors habit.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“Heaven is precision.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“How much of twentieth-century poetry, how much of my own poetry, is the cry of the damned?”
― Christian Wiman

“When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life. I lived not with God, nor with his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting through the days on a tide of tiny vanities—a publication, a flirtation, a strong case made for some weak nihilism—nights all adagios and alcohol as my mind tore luxuriously into itself. I can see now how deeply God’s absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-love at once protected me from and subjected me to. Was the fall into belief or into unbelief? Both. For if grace woke me to God’s presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“Silence is the language of faith. Action--be it church or charity, politics or poetry--is the translation.”
― Christian Wiman

“If faith requires you to foreclose on an inspiration, surely it is not faith.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer