“I say that a myth is a story which has particular energy, mythic resonance. I always say that a myth is a tear in the fabric of reality through which all of this spiritual energy pours.”

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.