My father was a Social Gospel, far-left liberal, and to some degree a mystic. But we did not have Bible readings; we had prayers.

We are thrown back on the text, for the most part. Archaeology can give us background. It doesn't either confirm or disprove the Bible, but it may illuminate it.

My own interest is far more in the Hebrew Bible. My religion is more personally related to the Hebrew Bible than it is to the New Testament.

The Garden of Eden presents the same story: If you want to make yourself gods, you'll find you're akin to the animals.

If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That's the Tower of Babel.

Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way.

I prefer to have all of this apparatus - historical, literary, critical - and then, beyond initial innocence and naiveté, to try to achieve a new innocence, a new naiveté.

I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.

There was certainly an old law code which stands behind the earliest form of Deuteronomy. Presumably that is what was lost.

With the Hebrew Bible, you're living in an austere world.

The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

I want to go to college and go back to Georgetown. It's a really cool place.

The benefit of one is the benefit of all, and the neglect of one is the neglect of all.

Anger is the feeling that makes your mouth work faster than your mind.

I am aware that those hateful persons called Original Researchers now maintain that Raleigh was not the man; but to them I turn a deaf ear.

Her legs went on forever, like staring at infinity through a wisp of cotton panty along a skin of satin sea.

It's not the failures in our life that define us, it's the moments when we decide that getting back up is all that matters

It's a pretty frantic world that we live in

I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

I have listened And I have looked With open eyes. I have poured my soul Into the world Seeking the unknown Within the known. And I sing out loud In amazement.