Are Footnotes Only For Quotes

#1. There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

George Santayana

#2. The worst way to release bad news is to bury it in the financial statement footnotes, in the hope that no one will see it. A diligent investor or analyst always reads the footnotes, and will not appreciate having to dig so deep to uncover potentially critical information.

Steven M. Bragg

#3. I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.

David Foster Wallace

#4. Never upstage a man. Don't top his joke, even if you have to bite your tongue to keep from doing it. Never launch loudly into your own opinions on a subject - whether it's petunias or politics. Instead, draw out his ideas to which you can gracefully add your footnotes from time to time.

Arlene Dahl

#5. Footnotes for Lamentations

Anonymous

#6. For the first lesson, I want you to play over every column of Modern Chess Openings, including the footnotes. And for the next lesson, I want you to do it again.

Bobby Fischer

#7. Following the footnotes of a Lincoln book can drive you towards madness. But it also gives you the chance to spend days trying to determine whether Lincoln might have actually taken a ride on a flying piano, and that's a damned interesting way to spend one's working life.

Adam Selzer

#8. Novelists never have to footnote.

Jane Smiley

#9. When I am a writer, I shall do parenthetical asides. And footnotes. There will be footnotes. I wonder how you do them? And italics. How do you make italics happen?

Neil Gaiman

#10. I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.

Mary Roach

#11. But there are certain books I would never put on a Kindle because you want to be able to look at graphs and photos or the footnotes and maps. You can't see that.

Lisa See

#12. It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.

Fulton J. Sheen

#13. Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.

Terence McKenna

#14. Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn't say their didn't shore it up with footnotes and research.

China Mieville

#15. The best journalism is sometimes about footnotes - when we write small to say something big.

Anthony Shadid

#16. The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Alfred North Whitehead

#17. When I first opened this book and saw all those scholarly footnotes, my heart leapt up as though I saw a host of golden daffodils.

Steven Moore

#18. He's a book full of footnotes brought to life. He's a jacket made of elbow patches.

Rainbow Rowell

#19. As illustrated in any number of footnotes, men are almost always 50 to 60 percent dumber in matters involving their crotch.

Scott Hawkins

#20. Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece

Vladimir Nabokov

#21. The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.

Mary Roach

#22. The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

Elizabeth Hardwick

#23. Contrary to what we conclude naturally, the gospel is not too good to be true. It is true! It's the truest truth in the entire universe. No strings attached! No fine print to read. No buts. No conditions. No qualifications. No footnotes. And especially, no need for balance.

Tullian Tchividjian

#24. Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Nicholson Baker

#25. But this is an occupational hazard of being a scientist. You say this is the best information I have and then you realize that not everyone is going to read the footnotes or the whole book, so people are going to get the wrong impression.

Bjorn Lomborg

#26. [Footnote:] Pliny the Elder perished in 79 A.D. when he refused to flee from the great eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, insisting that everything would be all right. It wasn't.

Will Cuppy

#27. All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

Henry Louis Gates

#28. Read the book through, undeterred and undismayed by the paragraphs, footnotes, comments, and references that escape you. If you let yourself get stalled, if you allow yourself to be tripped up by any one of these stumbling blocks, you are lost.

Mortimer J. Adler

#29. Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.

Noel Coward

#30. Equality means equality for all- no exceptions, no 'yes, buts', no asterisked footnotes imposing limits.

Hubert H. Humphrey

#31. If you look into the footnotes of the business model for Apple Computer you'll see that they actually give the computers away for free; they just charge for the inflated sense of self-worth.

Christian Lander

#32. If there was one thing I refused to be, it was an insignificant footnote in some boy's history.

Justina Chen