Shelby Foote Quotes

It wasn't a question of luck, the way some folks will tell you; they will tell you it's back luck to be near the wounded. It was just that we didn't want to be close to them any longer than it took to...

Originally it was intended to put the names of the war dead on the signboard, the whites down one side and the Negroes down the other, with the American flag between. But the notion of having them all...

We were green; most of us had never left home before (officers as well as men, except the officers carried their greenness better) yet here we were, traveling south up an enemy river past slow creeks...

We’re each two different people, is why, and we live in two different worlds. Just as we carry our waking bodies and some of our waking thoughts into the world of dreams, so we bring the thoughts and...

They nodded their heads with quick flicky motions, like birds, and nursed their rifles, keeping them out of the dirt. I had gotten to know them all in a month and a few of them were even from the same...

With such incentives to brave deeds, and with the trust that God is with us, your generals will lead you confidently to the combat - assured of success. ________ General commanding

For my part I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a...

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

But as they walked home together through the leaf-plastered streets, under that eerie refulgence, her father seemed to have divined her plans. This was in his manner, not his words: they were halfway...

The money was tobacco money, not from the growing end but the manufacturing; they were from Winston-Salem, and there was plenty of it. Even Jeff who was a younger son (as Amy’s father had been, in the...

Then too, and this was as romantic as the others, Briartree was the only thing she had ever really owned. Everything else had more or less been lent her; so it seemed. But this was hers, earned by blo...

Then one night at the very end of May he came home late with the smell of perfume on him. So thats it, I thought: after all these years. And I waited. Time after time I’d seen it happen to other men a...

The politicians were in full bay, particularly those of his own party who had been urging, without success, his support of antislavery legislation which he feared would lose him the border states, hel...

There is no chance for surprise, he said, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders with that French way he had. Theyll be intrenched to the eyes.

It was a strange thing to be in a distant land, among things you'd never seen before, all because our people in Congress had squabbled among themselves and failed to get along and there were hotheads...

The woman was in her middle twenties and she wore a sort of tennis dress that shouted Money almost as loudly as the car did, sleeveless and V neck, of a semi-transparent material, chiffon or crêpe-de-...

The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

I told her the time to start worrying about a lawyer’s fee was after he brought it up: which was a lie. Most people didnt pay them anyhow, I said: which at least was partly true, to a degree.

On paper, in the colonel's lamp-lit office, when we saw a problem it was easy to fix; all we had to do was direct that corps commanders regulate their columns so as not to delay each other, halting un...

Whatever shortcomings they might develop under pressure (Grant’s, for instance, was said to be whiskey; hearing which, the President was supposed to have asked what brand he drank, intending to send a...