Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
16 quotes
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge."
"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."
"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."
"Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone."
"If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it."
"History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another."
"Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike."
"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."
"Please note, I am not suggesting that illicit drugs are required to break down social barriers."
"Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius."
"Reading...is a full-contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources."
"The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying."