06132026. "i should never pray to be at peace in my belief. i should pray only that my anxiety be given peaceful outlets, that i might be the means to a peace that i myself do not feel" (christian wiman, my bright abyss, p. 108)

06052026. "reading bonhoeffer makes me realize again how small our points of contact with life can be, perhaps even necessarily are, when our truest self finds its emotional and intellectual expression. with all that is going on around bonhoeffer, and with all the people in his life (he wrote letters to many other people and had close relationships with other prisoners), it is only in the letters to bethge that his thought really sparks and finds focus. life is always a question of intensity, and intensity is always a matter of focus. contemporary despair is to feel the multiplicity of existence with no possibility for expression or release of one's particular being. i fear sometimes that we are evolving in such a way that the possibilities for these small but intense points of intimacy and expression - poetry, for instance - are not simply vanishing but are becoming no longer felt as necessary pressures" (christian wiman, my bright abyss, p. 49)

06032026. "what was the point of writing if all you ended up with was this, the textual equivalent of a speakerphone voicemail overheard on a bus?" (andrew martin, early work, p. 210)

06012026. "she radiated the kind of positivity that suggested barely repressed rage" (andrew martin, early work, p. 5)