Shelby Foote Quotes

The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different route...

That was what bothered him most: the fact that she seemed to encourage his advances, and even granted him certain liberties, up to the point at which she turned on him with violence or laughter. He di...

I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process.

Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled, the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains—its...

I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for w...

So I had decided to do it the easy way. Make them believe he was insane and the scales would fall from their eyes; they would ‘understand’; the fear, the hate would be gone, evaporated. So thats it, t...

Back home the election was over; the country had a new president: ‘Mr Roosevelt’ he was called at first, then ‘Roosevelt,’ then ‘that Roosevelt,’ and finally just ‘he’ or ‘him’ by mouths that twisted...

At any rate, though he never succeeded in laughing at her, as she had done (and continued to do) at him, he fulfilled at least half of what he had predicted he would do when they were married; he beat...

You easy-living boys had better get set, they said. There's johnnies out there thicker than fleas on a billy goat in a barnlot

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

He is the kind of person I should expect to rescue one from a mad dog at any risk but then insist on a stoical indifference to the fright afterward. Jefferson Davis's future wife describing him at fir...

I asked myself, again and again: ‘What does it mean? What does it mean?’ And you know, I finally found the answer; one answer, anyhow. It dont mean a thing. Nothing. Why should it mean anything? I sto...

In Paris (though he had just come four thousand miles from the river where it was born, though Bessie Smith herself had sung at a Negro dance ten miles from Briartree while they were packing for their...

I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears.

I'm crazy about Grant: his character, his nature, his science in fighting and everything else. But I don't like the idea that he never accepted the blame for anything, always found someone else to bla...

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're bein...

For the people sat in their Sunday clothes, soberly nodding agreement with all the preachers said about impending doom on earth and searing flame hereafter, and came out Monday morning as before; they...

Longevity conquers scandal every time.

So their relationship entered a new phase, characterized by enmity round the clock. True, they had fought all along—there had been the gladiatorial contests in which she would snatch up any handy weap...

But it seemed so wrong, so scandalous, somehow so unreligious for a dead man to have to keep on fighting - or running, anyhow - that it made me sick at my stomach. I didn't want to have any more to do...