Thadeus’s Reviews > The Catholic Writer Today: And Other Essays > Status Update

"As an artist, I learned something else from the Latin hymns--that art is mysterious. It reaches us in ways we don't fully understand."

"A tyrant can kill bodies but not ideas, especially not ideas the just consider worth dying for. The moral example of martyrs not only outlived the empires that persecuted them; it gradually transformed them."

“The impulse of my poetry originates mostly in mystery, anxiety, and uncertainty. If something can be stated unequivocally and unambiguously, I see no purpose or pleasure in saying it in poetry.”

"Everyone had come seeking a new life--at the cost of an old one. Exile was never an abstraction in mid-century Los Angeles. It was our common background."
- Response of Gioia to an interview question about where his sense of exile comes from.