Quotes from 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.

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

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

Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

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.

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

The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying.

Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.

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

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.

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

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.

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

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

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.

In a sense, every story or poem is a vacation.

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.

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.

Don't read with your eyes.

Professors also read, and think, symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.