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

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.

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.

There are surely many legitimate approaches to Biblical literature, and I think that it depends very much on one's experience and temperament which way one deals primarily with Biblical material.

We ask our brain to stop worrying, stop obsessing, stop dreaming the same scary dreams again and again. But our brain rarely takes requests.

Life is only logical, and to think it's a gift is depressing.

Well, I love geraniums, and anybody who does not love geraniums must obviously be a depraved and loathsome person.

True beauty radiates not from outer cosmetics, but from the simple joy of making a difference for those that need your voice, passion, and time without expecting or wanting anything in return.

Faith is the effort to believe what your common sense tells you is not true.

Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.

If you're just like someone else, we don't need you.

Is it not a strange blindness on our part to teach publicly the techniques of warfare and to reward with medals those who prove to be the most adroit killers?

I still didn't look at him. I was afraid if I did that, I would turn around, run back to him, and hurl myself into his arms.

Wow," Thalia muttered. "Apollo is hot." "He's the sun god," I said. "That's not what I meant.