Top 60 Thomas C. Foster Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.”

— Thomas C. Foster

2. “Here it is: there’s only one story. There, I said it and I can’t very well take it back. There is only one story. Ever. One. It’s always been going on and it’s everywhere around us and every story you’ve ever read or heard or watched is part of it.”

— Thomas C. Foster

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

— Thomas C. Foster

4. “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

5. “Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer’s alone.”

— Thomas C. Foster

6. “Don’t read with your eyes.”

— Thomas C. Foster

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

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

— Thomas C. Foster

13. “Compelled belief is no belief at all.”

— Thomas C. Foster

14. “Whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion.”

— Thomas C. Foster

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

— Thomas C. Foster

16. “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

17. “We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn’t die, just as it doesn’t ‘progress’ or ‘decay.’ It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.”

— Thomas C. Foster

18. “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

19. “The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.”

— Thomas C. Foster

20. “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

21. “What we mean when speaking of “myth” in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry – all very highly useful and informative in their own right – can’t.”

— Thomas C. Foster

22. “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

23. “There is only one story.”

— Thomas C. Foster

24. “If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won’t save it.”

— Thomas C. Foster

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

— Thomas C. Foster

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Please note, I am not suggesting that illicit drugs are required to break down social barriers.”

— Thomas C. Foster

30. “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

31. “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

32. “Don’t wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.”

— Thomas C. Foster

33. “History is story, too.”

— Thomas C. Foster

34. “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

35. “Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius.”

— Thomas C. Foster

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

— Thomas C. Foster

37. “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.”

— Thomas C. Foster

38. “Sameness doesn’t present us with metaphorical possibilities, whereas difference – from the average, the typical, the expected – is always rich with possibility.”

— Thomas C. Foster

39. “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.”

— Thomas C. Foster

40. “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.”

— Thomas C. Foster

41. “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.”

— Thomas C. Foster

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

— Thomas C. Foster

43. “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.”

— Thomas C. Foster

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

— Thomas C. Foster

45. “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.”

— Thomas C. Foster

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

— Thomas C. Foster

47. “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.”

— Thomas C. Foster

48. “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.”

— Thomas C. Foster

49. “Much of what we think about literature, we feel first.”

— Thomas C. Foster

50. “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