Thomas C. Foster > Quotes

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“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, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, visions of ourselves that we would never 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, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“When it's over, we may feel wooed, adored, appreciated, or abused, but it will have been an affair to remember.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“Whenever people eat or drink together, it's communion.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“In a sense, every story or poem is a vacation.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: For Kids

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“Don't read with your eyes.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“And romance is just the place for creating mythic figures doing mythic things. Like carving 'civilzation' out of the wilderness. Like showing us what a hero looks life, a real, American, sprung-from-the soil, lethal-weapon-with-leggings, bona fide hero. And for a guy who never marries, he has a lot of offspring. Shane. The Virginian. The Ringo Kid. The Man with No Name. Just think how many actors would have had no careers without Natty Bumppo. Gary Cooper. John Wayne. Alan Ladd. Tom Mix. Clint Eastwood. Silent. Laconic. More committed to their horse or buddy than to a lady. Professional. Deadly. In his Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence waxes prolix on Natty's most salient feature: he's a killer. And so are his offspring. This heros can talk, stiltedly to be sure, but he prefers silence. He appreciates female beauty but is way more committed to his canoe or his business partner (his business being death and war) or, most disturbingly, his long rifle, Killdeer. Dr. Freud, your three-o'clock is here. Like those later avatars, he is a wilderness god, part backwoods sage, part cold-blooded killer, part unwilling Prince Charming, part jack-of-all-trades, but all man. Here's how his creator describes him: 'a philosopher of the wilderness, simple-minded, faithful, utterly without fear, yet prudent.' A great character, no doubt, but hardly a person. A paragon. An archetype. A miracle. But a potentially real person--not so much.”
― Thomas C. Foster, Twenty-five Books That Shaped America: How White Whales, Green Lights, and Restless Spirits Forged Our National Identity – An Entertaining and Enriching Guide to Literature, Culture, and Citizenship

“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, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form

“Please note, I am not suggesting that illicit drugs are required to break down social barriers.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“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, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“characters as rich and complex as those we believe ourselves to be”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form