Quotes from Thomas C. Foster

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.

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.

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.

Sameness doesn't present us with metaphorical possibilities, whereas difference - from the average, the typical, the expected - is always rich with possibility.

There is only one story.

His meanings are quite different from those of Twain. Together the river and the bridge constitute an image of total connection.

Much of what we think about literature, we feel first.

Rather, a reader's imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another.

Even if the writer told you his intent, as a group they're notorious liars and not to be trusted.

Films and television let us experience other lives vicariously, or perhaps voyeuristically, as we watch those lives play out. But in a novel, we can become those characters, we can identify from the inside with someone whose life is radically different from our own. Best of all, when it's over … we get to be ourselves again, changed slightly or profoundly by the experience, possessed of new insights perhaps, but recognizably us once more.

Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different.

There is, in fact, no form of dysfunctional family or no personal disintegration of character for which there is not a Greek or Roman model.

One mention of birds or flight is an occurrence, two may be a coincidence, but three constitutes a definite trend. And trends, as we know, cry out for examination.

What we have to work with is hints and allegations, really, evidence, sometimes only a trace, that points to something lying behind the text. It's useful to keep in mind that any aspiring writer is probably also a hungry, aggressive reader and will have absorbed a tremendous amount of literary history and literary culture.

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden

Part of pattern recognition is talent, but a whole lot of it is practice: if you read enough and give what you read enough thought, you begin to see patterns, archetypes, recurrences.

But the point is this: stories grow out of other stories, poems out of other poems. And they don't have to stick to genre. Poems can learn from plays, songs from novels.

That's what happens when works get reenvisioned: we learn something about the age that produced the original as well as about our own.

Stop apologizing! It doesn't help, and it sells the speaker short.

Education is mostly about institutions and getting tickets stamped; learning is what we do for ourselves.

You can't create stories in a vacuum.

Slavery allows its victims no decision-making power over any aspect of their lives, including the decision to live. The lone exception, the only power they have, is that they may choose to die.

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

The question always is, what does misfortune really tell us?