Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas C. Foster Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 54 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Thomas C. Foster.

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Famous Quotes By Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1278941

Always" and "never" are not words that have much meaning in literary study. For one thing, as soon as something seems to always be true, some wise guy will come along and write something to prove that it's not. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1604205

A novel is a made-up work about made-up people in a made-up place, all of which is very real. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 2057442

So what did you think the devil would look like? If he were red with a tail, horns, and cloven hooves, any fool could say no. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 2242435

T here's no written rule anywhere that I know of stating this, no First-teenth Amendment to the Literary Constitution, but there might as well be: you get one national poet. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 567870

In a sense, every story or poem is a vacation. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 878228

Everywhere you look, the ground is already camped on. So you sigh and pitch your tent where you can, knowing someone else has been there before. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 518730

Reading ... is a full-contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 540091

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

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1760655

Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time? — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 777735

We accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1808543

We - as readers or writers, tellers or listeners - understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1046773

The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 2169278

Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1909853

Education is mostly about institutions and getting tickets stamped; learning is what we do for ourselves. When we're lucky, they go together. If I had to choose, I'd take learning. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1503990

Going After Cacciato — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 2025397

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

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 2216438

Whenever people eat or drink together, it's communion. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1215291

A novel without readers is still a novel. It has meaning, since it has had at least one reader, the person who wrote it. Its range of meanings, however, is quite limited. Add readers, add meaning. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1849771

What happens if the writer is good is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the opposite: the work actually acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up with prior texts, weight from the accumulated use of certain basic patterns and tendencies. Moreover, works are actually more comforting because we can recognize elements of them from our prior reading. I suspect that a wholly original work, one that owed nothing to previous writing, would so lack familiarity as to be quite unnerving to readers. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 2041726

Don't read with your eyes. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 2071466

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

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 2079199

If to get to the finish line the hero must walk over a sea of bodies, then so be it. He can die at said line, but he's got to get there. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1694023

Every novel is brand-new. It's never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it's merely the latest in a long line of narratives - not just novels, but narratives generally - since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 2100034

And we feel that those characters couldn't be anywhere but where they are, that those characters couldn't say the things they say if they were uprooted and planted in, say, Minnesota or Scotland. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 2170801

We love the plays, the great characters, the fabulous speeches, the witty repartee even in times of duress. I hope never to be mortally stabbed, but if I am, I'd sure like to have the self-possession, when asked if it's bad, to answer, "No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve," as Mercutio does in Romeo and Juliet. I mean, to be dying and clever at the same time, how can you not love that? — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1550033

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. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 2179246

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 2185558

IRIS MURDOCH ONLY WROTE one novel in her lifetime. But she wrote it twenty-six times. Anthony Burgess never wrote the same book twice. And he wrote about a thousand. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1497389

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. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1442992

characters as rich and complex as those we believe ourselves to be — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1399657

Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 668679

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? — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 264716

We have to bring our imaginations to bear on a story if we are to see all it's possibilitiess; otherwise it's just about somebody who did something. Whatever we take away from stories in the way of significance, symbolism, theme, meaning, pretty much anything except character and plot, we discover because our imagination engages with that of the author. Pretty amazing when you consider that the author may have been dead for thousands of years, yet we can still have this exchange, this dialogue, with her. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 273982

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

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 398421

The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 409517

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

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 520681

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. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 559557

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." — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 600790

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

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 608800

Memory. Symbol. Pattern. These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the professorial reader from the rest of the crowd. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 617286

Corollaries - where have I seen his face, don't I know that — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 650073

So how do we get from there to a pattern of experience that can stand for the whole of postcolonial Latin America? Ah, our para dox again. The solution, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 662288

In Eudora Welty's masterful story "Why I Live at the P.O." (1941), the narrator is engaged in a sibling rivalry with her younger sister, who has come home after leaving under suspicious if not actually disgraceful circumstances. The narrator, Sister, is outraged at having to cook two chickens to feed five people and a small child just because her "spoiled" sister has come home. What Sister can't see, but we can, is that those two fowl are really a fatted calf. It may not be a grand feast by traditional standards, but it is a feast, as called for upon the return of the Prodigal Son, even if the son turns out to be a daughter. Like the brothers in the parable, Sister is irritated and envious that the child who left, and ostensibly used up her "share" of familial goodwill, is instantly welcomed, her sins so quickly forgiven. Then — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1311483

Ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 726449

In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.' I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 756153

The process of dehuminazing the locals was under way, and it had very little to do with veracity. The Puritan narratives would continue that process and bring the devil into the mix. At least John Smith didn't think Satan was involved. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 770682

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. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 814959

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. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 872027

History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 879330

Of his need to assert responsibility for his own life. It may be that Adela does panic in the face of Nothingness, only recovering herself when she takes responsibility by recanting in the witness box. Perhaps it's all about nothing more than her own self-doubts, her own psychological or spiritual difficulties. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1001879

Someone had to go first, show that there was a life to be recorded here, that this place, this new set of possibilities, could inspire a new literature. Cooper set the signpost on the road, and hearty travelers have been following it ever since. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1100752

The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 92951

Every reader's experience of every work is unique, largely because each person will emphasize various elements to differing degrees, and those differences will cause certain features of the text to become more or less pronounced. We bring an individual history to our reading, a mix of previous readings, to be sure, but also a history that includes, but is not limited to, educational attainment, gender, race, class, faith, social involvement, and philosophical inclination. These factors will inevitably influence what we understand in our reading, and nowhere is this individuality clearer than in the matter of symbolism. — Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster Quotes 1253317

There is only one story. — Thomas C. Foster