101 Quotes by Jay Parini

For the most part, I think of PC as meaning Plain Civil. You treat people the way you'd like to be treated yourself, and that means not using language that is demeaning.

American politicians who dwell on American exceptionalism only dishonor us by suggesting we play dumb to our past.

The fact is, we need markers in life, whether we subscribe to a religion or not. And the major holidays, such as Christmas, serve to remind us of the turning world.

Christmas is a story that has both religious and pagan origins, and to ignore its power is to ignore the power of myth - those symbols and legends that help us to ground our lives.

As 'Possession' progresses, it seems less and less like the usual satire about academia and more like something by Jorge Luis Borges.

A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-career whose time has certainly come, because 'Possession' is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.

In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are many Aramaic texts from the time of Jesus, so one can get a pretty good idea of what the language of Jesus looked liked.

It seems likely that Jesus, being a scholarly young man, learned some Hebrew, but that's conjecture. It's more likely that Jesus spoke some Greek, as this language dominated the region after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century.

The stories about the life and teachings of Jesus were mainly told in Greek, the original language of the gospels.