Quotes from Thomas C. Foster

The amazing thing about books is how they have lives of their own.

Now we know, as she does, that she can carry on, that discovering that men can't be counted on doesn't mean the world ends, that she's a whole person.

Revolutions inevitably fail, he tells us, because those who come to power are corrupted by it and reject the values and principles they initially embraced.

The thing about loss-of-innocence stories, the reason they hit so hard, is that they're so final. You can never go back.

We want strangeness in our stories, but we want familiarity, too. We want a new novel to be not quite like anything we've read before. At the same time, wee look for it to be sufficiently like other things we've read so that we can use those to make sense of it.

Literature has its own logic; it is not life. Not only that, but (and this is key): characters are not people... and we forget that at our peril.

More important, we're all capable of growth, development, and change. We can get better, although we sometimes fail to do so. To put this another way, we are all, each and every last one of us, the protagonist of our own story.

Different: no guilty party exists in the narrative (unless you count the author, who is present everywhere and nowhere).

On one level, everyone who writes anything knows pure originality is impossible. 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.

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

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.

Own the books you read. Also poems, stories, flash fiction, plays, memoirs, movies, creative nonfiction, and all the rest. ... take ownership of your reading. It's yours. It's special. It is exactly like nobody else's in the whole world.

Your reading should be fun. We only call them literary works. Really, though, it's all a form of play. So play, Dear Reader, play. And fare thee well.

poem is an experiment with and in language, an attempt to discover how best to capture its subject and make readers see it anew.

Another linguistic accident: an unholy marriage of Greek terminology filtered through Latin. That sort of thing begets monsters.

We need to come out of our silos. Open the doors and come out into the air and the light. Hack through a wall and make a door if necessary. Expand our horizons. Understand that divergent viewpoints can be valid. That sympathetic viewpoints can be false. And that we need to be able to discern the difference.

This is based on no science, pseudo of otherwise, but I firmly believe that the elapsed time between the development of language and creation of the first poem was about five minutes.

Writing well is the best revenge.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.