Jay Parini Quotes
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History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.
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A long-running argument exists over whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. In my view, they certainly do.
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I often think that the last holiday is the greatest, but then some really stand out in my mind. One of the best was one my wife and I had in the Lake District. We stayed in a B&B and walked around the countryside for two weeks.
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The ability to sympathize with those around us seems crucial to our survival, and it's connected to the mirroring functions of the brain.
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One thing a narcissist doesn't like is to look in a mirror that is in any way genuinely reflective of what's on the other side of it.
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'Of Mice and Men,' Steinbeck's fifth novel, adheres to a simple dramatic structure, which observes the classic Aristotelian unities of time, place and action.
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Sarah Palin is a figure of fun on the American left, easily lampooned as a know-nothing, gun-toting ex-beauty queen who loves God and the red, white and blue above pretty much anything else except for Todd, her macho husband, who races snowmobiles across the Alaskan tundra.
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A revival of 'Of Mice and Men' would have seemed out of place in years of Reaganomics, Donald Trump and Michael Milken, a time when Rambo supplied millions of filmgoers with a fantasy that masked what was really going on in their lives.
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I had a year off, so my wife and I were heading to Italy to study Italian. We found a little house in a village called Atrani. I discovered that Gore Vidal lived right above us in a big house, so I sent him a note.
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If you think about it, Jesus was this religious genius who grows up on the Silk Road, and so He's getting from the West all these Greek ideas from Plato about body and soul.
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The U.S. invaded Vietnam because many in our government - Lyndon Johnson's best and brightest - imagined it could impose a government on that country that would provide a buffer against China and stop the supposedly rolling dominos of Communism.
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I came to know Gore Vidal in the mid-1980s, when I was living in southern Italy, virtually a neighbour, and our friendship lasted until his death in 2012. Needless to say, he was a complicated and often combative man.
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I suspect that a huge amount of the anxiety and suffering that we see around can be closely traced to our wanton misuse of our resources. Just look at any garbage dump and see what is wasted. In a sense, we've wasted our souls.
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I think that the practice of religion allows one to discover emotional and psychological truth of a kind not available in the secular world.
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Colleges and classrooms should be havens of tranquility, places where thoughtful discussions occur, where students work together with their teachers to acquire knowledge of the arts and sciences.
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Ridding the world of poverty is, of course, a fantasy.
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What I'm trying to argue, as passionately as I can, is that the Jesus story isn't worth dying for, it's worth living for. Jesus presents a third way, a way of being in the worth that embraces the Sermon on the Mount, with its challenge to violence and greed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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By the time I went to college, I knew the major passages of the Bible pretty much by heart.
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Whether we're looking at the burial box of St. James, a fragment of the True Cross, the Shroud of Turin, or some bones supposedly belonging to John the Baptist, there is always excitement and distrust, faith and doubt.
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I argue that the resurrection was not the Great Resuscitation. It was a total transformation. I just don't accept the black-and-white thinking that goes along with needing to regard the gospels are literally true.
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I suspect that the framers of the Bill of Rights have long since rolled over in their graves.