Zero at the Bone Quotes

“A writer is not obligated to fight despair. Sometimes the best gift can be the starkest depiction of an intractable reality, that head-clearing unsquinting astringent allover intake of a truth.”
― Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

“THE PLACE WHERE WE ARE RIGHT From the place where we are right flowers will never grow in the spring. The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard. But doubt and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow. And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.”
― Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

“Lord let me suffer much and then die Let me walk through silence and leave nothing behind not even fear Make the world continue let the ocean kiss the sand just as before Let the grass stay green so that the frogs can hide in it so that someone can bury his face in it and sob out his love Make the day rise brightly as if there were no more pain And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane bumped by a bumblebee’s head tr. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak”
― Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

“Unreal things have a reality of their own. They will exert their force upon you whether or not you recognize them, but only when they are recognized can they become part of the reality that we usually refer to when we say that word. You have to assent to the invisible if you are ever to see it.”
― Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

“But would you have it otherwise? Eve ought to get some credit for bringing consciousness into existence, for the music and art and poetry that have arisen from that rift; and for better — speculating here, but it seems likely — sex; and then too the intricacies of the atoms, the impossibly immense cosmos, microbes and multiverse and all that falls under the name of human knowledge, all the wonders wasted on atheists who must have their line in the sand, wasted on believers who do not have within them the hard unerring eye of the atheist that enables them to see that line in the sand — all this, too, we owe to a woman. Paradise is the purity that no one ever wanted.”
― Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

“But would you have it otherwise? Eve ought to get some credit for bringing consciousnes into existence, for the music and art and peotry that have arisen from that rift; and for better–speculating here, but it seems likely–sex; and then too the intricacies of the atoms, the impossibly immense cosmos, microbes and multiverse and all that falls under the name of human knowledge, all the wonders wasted on atheists who must have their line in the sand, wasted on believers who do not have within them the hard unerring eye of the atheist that enables them to see that line in the sand–all this, too, we owe to a woman. Paradise is the purity that no one ever wanted.”
― Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair