Andrei Bădică

“I remember when we parted there was an awkward moment when the severity of my situation and our unfamiliarity with each other left us with no words, and in a gesture that I’m sure was completely unconscious, he placed his hand over his heart for just a second as a flicker of empathetic anguish crossed his face. It sliced right through me. It cut through the cloud I was living in and let the plain day pour its balm upon me. It was, I am sure, one of those moments when we enact and reflect a mercy and mystery that are greater than we are, when the void of God and the love of God, incomprehensible pain and the peace that passeth understanding, come together in a simple human act. We stood for a minute in the aftermath, not talking, and then went our suddenly less separate ways.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“He would once say that he wanted Leaves of Grass to be published as a pocket book, to be carried around everywhere: “That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Along with sharp criticism, America needed a class of writers that would embrace the country and give it “a national character, an identity” creating “a new moral American continent” without which the physical one was “a carcass, a bloat.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“I am so glad To come accidentally upon My self at the end of a tortuous road And have learned with surprise that God Unworshipped withers to the Futile One. —PATRICK KAVANAGH, FROM “AUDITORS IN”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer