Best 24 quotes of Thomas C Foster on MyQuotes

Thomas C Foster

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    Thomas C Foster

    A witty and informative professor posits that more authors do not choose titles borrowed from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays for the reason some people claim not to have partners: "All the good ones are taken.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Never feel dumb. Not knowing who or what is no sin. Ignorance is simply the measure of what you haven't got to yet. I find writers and works every day that I haven't got to, haven't even heard of.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Real people are made out of a whole lot of things-flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

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    Thomas C Foster

    The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Whenever people eat or drink together, it's communion.

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    Thomas C Foster

    When it's over, we may feel wooed, adored, appreciated, or abused, but it will have been an affair to remember.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It’s all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Here it is: there's only one story. There, I said it and I can't very well take it back. There is only one story. Ever. One. It's always been going on and it's everywhere around us and every story you've ever read or heard or watched is part of it.

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    Thomas C Foster

    His argument runs like this: there is no goodness without free will. Without the ability to freely choose-or reject-the good, an individual possesses no control over his own soul, and without that control, there is not possibility of attaining grace. In the language of Christianity, a beliver cannot be saved unless the choice to follow Christ is freely made, unless the option not to follow him genuinely exists. Compelled belief is no belief at all.

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    Thomas C Foster

    I can’t go as far as Barthes in killing off the author, but I’m with him on the importance of the reader. We are the ones, after all, who exist long after the author (the real, physical being) is in the grave, choosing to read the book, deciding if it still has meaning, deciding what it means for us, feeling sympathy or contempt or amusement for its people and their problems. Take just the opening paragraph. If, having read that, we decide the book isn’t worth our time, then the book ceases to exist in any meaningful fashion. Someone else may cause it to live again another day in another reading, but for now, dead as Jacob Marley. Did you have any idea you held so much power?

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    Thomas C Foster

    If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Please note, I am not suggesting that illicit drugs are required to break down social barriers.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

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    Thomas C Foster

    The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

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    Thomas C Foster

    There is only one story.

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    Thomas C Foster

    Those stories- myth, archetype, religious narrative, the great body of literature- are always with us. Always in us. We can draw upon them, tap into them, add to them whenever we want.

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    Thomas C Foster

    We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.

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    Thomas C Foster

    What we mean when speaking of "myth" in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry—all very highly useful and informative in their own right—can't.