“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.”

American writer and academic

Jay Parini is an American writer and academic, known for fiction, poetry, biography, and criticism. He has published 96 quotes on the site. His work includes novels centered on Leo Tolstoy, Walter Benjamin, Paul the Apostle, and Herman Melville, along with a novelized memoir about a road trip with Jorge Luis Borges. Across these books, he often works at the border between literary history and imagined life, drawing on figures from the canon and the idea of the writer as subject.