Wendy Doniger

"Reading across cultures expands what we thought was possible to think."

"The tension between tradition and innovation is where meaning is made."

"Mythology shows us that love and violence are often neighbors."

"Understanding the past requires imagination as well as scholarship."

"The gods remind us that privilege carries responsibility and danger."

"Stories carry within them the seeds of resistance and transformation."

"The sacred texts of one age become the literature of another."

"Mythology is a mirror in which we see ourselves magnified and strange."

"The study of religion requires us to bracket our own certainties."

"Women who tell stories have always threatened established orders."

"Myths survive because they are plastic enough to accommodate new meanings."

"The sacred and the profane are not opposites but intimates."

"Every reading of a text is an act of creation."

"The past is never simply past; it lives in us."

"Mythology teaches that desire is powerful and worthy of serious attention."

"Understanding other cultures begins with respect for their stories."

"The margins of texts often contain the most subversive content."

"Scholarship is at its best when it opens rather than closes possibilities."

"Myths encode ethical dilemmas that have no simple solutions."

"The sacred is encountered in language, in story, in symbol."

"Transformation stories remind us that we are never fixed."

"The gods are anthropomorphic because we understand ourselves through projection."

"History is written by the victors, but mythology is written by everyone."

"Reading challenging texts makes us more capacious as human beings."

"The authority of a text lies not in its age but in its relevance."

"Mythology celebrates the complexity of human motivation and desire."

"The sacred texts of other cultures deserve the same respect as our own."

"Every interpretation is incomplete, and that is its virtue."

"The study of mythology is an act of resistance against forgetting."

"Stories shape how we understand ourselves and our possibilities."