Ambition and Survival Quotes

“You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as "faith" or "belief". If God is not in the very fabric of existence for you, if you do not find Him (or miss Him!) in the details of your daily life, then religion is just one more way to commit spiritual suicide.”
― Christian Wiman, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet

“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

“We reveal ourselves much more deeply—both in terms of taste and character—in our enthusiasms than in our censures.”
― Christian Wiman, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet