Thomas C Foster quotes:

A witty and informative professor posits that more authors do not choose titles borrowed from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays for the reason some people claim not to have partners: "All the good ones are taken."

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

Ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Never feel dumb. Not knowing who or what is no sin. Ignorance is simply the measure of what you haven't got to yet. I find writers and works every day that I haven't got to, haven't even heard of.

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.