Top 100 Foote's Quotes

#1. For the poor the whole world is a self-constituted critic; your smallest action is open to debate. No secret place of your soul is safe from invasion.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #6889
#2. He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others.

Samuel Foote

Foote's Quotes #13005
#3. One who preserves all the exterior decencies of ignorance.

Samuel Foote

Foote's Quotes #26781
#4. My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #51260
#5. I so earnestly believe that prayer can be helpful and guide you and protect you and inspire you. I mean, I'm in awe.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #52944
#6. I simply don't believe in failure. In itself, it doesn't exist. We create it. We make ourselves fail.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #57795
#7. 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 blame for any mistake that was ever made, including blaming Prentiss for Shiloh.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #85994
#8. If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture.

Brian Foote

Foote's Quotes #94539
#9. But the same thing was true in the army. You slept in a barracks with all kinds of people of every nationality, every trade, every character and quality you can imagine, and that was a good experience.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #100236
#10. Burnside left even sooner, hard on the heels of a violent argument with Meade, an exchange of recriminations which a staff observer said went far toward confirming one's belief in the wealth and flexibility of the English language as a medium of personal dispute.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #122479
#11. They will tell you Shiloh was no cavalry battle; the field was too cut-up with ravines and choked with timber for the usual mounted work. However, none of Forrest's men realized this at the time and we had our moments

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #123366
#12. If I ever teach writing again, I'd say the first lesson is to listen.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #148014
#13. 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.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #164296
#14. I've known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them ... to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and don't ask quarters.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #181608
#15. I don't think I'll ever stop writing. I write almost every day. I'd write plays even if they were never done again. You're at the mercy of whatever talent you have.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #197423
#16. You realize the futility of worry. You learn to hate the small and the little. Life is a pie which you cut in large slices, not grudgingly, not sparingly. You know your limitations and proceed to eliminate them; your abilities, and proceed to develop them. You are free.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #229814
#17. Poverty is relative, and the lack of food and of the necessities of life is not necessarily a hardship. Spiritual and social ostracism, the invasion of your privacy, are what constitute the pain of poverty.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #236692
#18. Now I lay me down to sleep In mud that's many fathoms deep. If I'm not here when you awake Just hunt me up with an oyster rake

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #261338
#19. 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.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #264431
#20. On Lee as commander: He had a cheerful dignity and could praise them (his men) without seeming to court their favor.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #273946
#21. 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

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #281584
#22. But I don't really write to honor the past. I write to investigate, to try to figure out what happened and why it happened, knowing I'll never really know. I think all the writers that I admire have this same desire, the desire to bring order out of chaos.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #289020
#23. The masters eye fattens the horse, and his foote the ground.

George Herbert

Foote's Quotes #308747
#24. A fact is not a truth until you love it.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #313116
#25. For too many of us ease is far more soul-destroying than trouble.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #337308
#26. 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.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #350871
#27. 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 with the war if this was the way it was going to be

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #366022
#28. Most of my inspiration, if that's the word, came from books themselves.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #370826
#29. 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 first meeting.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #379368
#30. He is not only dull in himself, but the cause of dullness in others.

Samuel Foote

Foote's Quotes #379717
#31. Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty most rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #398087
#32. A few hours with Beethoven are more restful than sleep.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #399268
#33. One must eliminate the traditional and cling to the essential.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #404011
#34. You know, Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don't know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.

Robert Duvall

Foote's Quotes #414197
#35. A writer has an inescapable voice. I think it's inherent in the nature, and I think that we don't control it anymore than we control what we want to write about.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #425317
#36. He who is good at excuses is generally good for nothing else.

Samuel Foote

Foote's Quotes #480871
#37. Before the war it was always the United States *are*, after the war it was the United States is ... it made us an is.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #522924
#38. When one is altering the face of the universe one cannot remember small helpful acts.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #524283
#39. So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf, to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. 'What! no soap?' So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber.

Samuel Foote

Foote's Quotes #526522
#40. Born in a cellar ... and living in a garret.

Samuel Foote

Foote's Quotes #569571
#41. Really to succeed, we must give; of our souls to the soulless, of our love to the lonely, of our intelligence to the dull. Business is quite as much a process of giving as it is of getting.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #578694
#42. The small perplexities of small minds eddy and boil about you. Confident from the experience that has led you out of these same dangers, you attack each problem as it appears, unafraid.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #593126
#43. Woman, I tell you, is a microcosm; and rightly to rule her, requires as great talents as to govern a state.

Samuel Foote

Foote's Quotes #593579
#44. Yes, there is work enough for all of us and today is no time to be idle

Martha Foote Crowe

Foote's Quotes #604174
#45. I'm a social writer in the sense that I want to record, but not in the sense of trying to change people's minds.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #639602
#46. Not married until 33, Abraham Lincoln said, A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that cannot hurt me.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #671341
#47. Early on, I said to myself that I would like to write a kind of moral and spiritual history of a place. It sounds a little pretentious, I know. But that's really what I set for myself.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #678577
#48. I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #682880
#49. Life is beset by many annoyances, and those that stand out above all are the life- insurance and advertising agents.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #699140
#50. You have to watch out with my plays. They're like yeast. You think they're one thing, then all of a sudden subtext gets to working.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #748942
#51. Work becomes at once a delight and a tyrant. For even when the time comes and you can relax, you hardly know how.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #760372
#52. It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown ... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #785672
#53. They were Amy and Jeff Carruthers and they rode south out of Bristol, gravel chattering under the upswept fenders. After a while the man said suddenly, "Whats it like?" Amy glanced out at the fields. "Cotton. Everywhere nothing but cotton.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #868880
#54. I never cared what kind of grade I got.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #873315
#55. Architecture is a hypothesis about the future that holds that subsequent change will be confined to that part of the design space encompassed by that architecture.

Brian Foote

Foote's Quotes #897632
#56. Much of the success of life depends upon keeping one's mind open to opportunity and seizing it when it comes.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #925925
#57. 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

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #950147
#58. I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #955977
#59. I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #964841
#60. 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 being deprived of something.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #972677
#61. The fame of Maria Foote's beauty and charm of manner had reached London, and in May 1814, she made her first appearance at Covent Garden Theatre and personated Amanthis in 'The Child of Nature' with such grace and effect that the manager complimented her with an immediate engagement.

Sabine Baring-Gould

Foote's Quotes #972727
#62. The deep experience of the lonely climb on the mountain of success brings a wealth beyond power to compute. To you all suffering is understandable and your heart opens wide in sympathy.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #1009489
#63. And I really do think that the difficulty of research makes it more real to you than punching a thing to find out how many men were killed at this particular action.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1043270
#64. Life means opportunity, and the thing men call death is the last wonderful, beautiful adventure.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #1070827
#65. I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1075112
#66. I can't begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1098192
#67. A rich man's war and a poor man's fight ...

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1113428
#68. It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible.

George William Foote

Foote's Quotes #1118186
#69. But they were all thinking the selfsame thing: I might be a disgrace to my country. I might be a coward, even. But I'm not up there in those woods getting shot at

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1118285
#70. I am always glad to think that my education was, for the most part, informal, and had not the slightest reference to a future business career. It left me free and untrammeled to approach my business problems without the limiting influence of specific training.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #1128271
#71. My mother, twenty-two, was Harriet Gautier Brooks, named for her paternal grandmother, but always called Hallie. My father, twenty-six, was Albert Horton Foote, named for his father and great-grandfather, and I was named Albert Horton Foote, Jr.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #1235611
#72. Hunger and cold, ill-health and pain are nothing. They pass. The thing that remains is ignorant criticism, well-meaning but futile advice, the contempt of a subordinate, the feelings of the underdog.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #1264095
#73. 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.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1276537
#74. North was only a direction indicated by a compass
if a man had one, that is, for otherwise there was no north or south or east or west; there was only the brooding desolation.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1277409
#75. A lot of writing is thinking.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #1289554
#76. did; then we'll take it to the next level.

Steven Foote

Foote's Quotes #1296488
#77. When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1310903
#78. When you're a writer, you have to write these stories, even if you don't get paid

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #1313059
#79. I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1323848
#80. One foote is better then two crutches.

George Herbert

Foote's Quotes #1324404
#81. A combination of all that was best in the gladdest days of the departing year ...

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1342066
#82. I come out of a strong oral tradition in the South,

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #1349092
#83. That is the wearisome part of business - there is no peace, no sense of certain, permanent achievement, no stability. The unexpected, and usually the awful, is forever happening.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #1365069
#84. Generally the first week in September brings the hottest weather of the year, and this was no exception. Overhead the fans turned slow, their paddle blades stirring the air up close to the ceiling but nowheres else ...

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1381802
#85. There is romance in coffee. It comes from the ends of the earth, and goes to the far corners of man's habitation.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #1431634
#86. Everyone needs an editor.

Timothy Foote

Foote's Quotes #1437283
#87. 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 in the South who thought more of their Negroes and their pride than they did of their country

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1483947
#88. There are two things in the world that can never get together- religion & common sense.

George William Foote

Foote's Quotes #1511236
#89. In New York, there are a lot of plays to see, and I try to see as many as I can.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #1564021
#90. Not only is orderliness an economy; it produces rest.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #1567643
#91. To me life means the growing of a soul. I do not know why this duty is imposed upon us. I merely know that it is, and I feel that we are given much latitude of free will.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Foote's Quotes #1582516
#92. Getting close to books, and spending time by myself, I was obliged to think about things I would never have thought about if I was busy romping around with a brother and sister.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1604697
#93. Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1605396
#94. A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1611102
#95. If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1664823
#96. I've redone plays of mine and made changes. A play is a living thing, and I'd never say I wouldn't rewrite years later. Tennessee Williams did that all the time, and it's distressing, because I'd like the play to be out there in its finished form.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #1677853
#97. My first memory was of stories about the past - a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived. It didn't take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone, and nothing could be done about it.

Horton Foote

Foote's Quotes #1690668
#98. We have more to fear from the opinions of our friends than the bayonets of our enemies. Politician turned Union General Nathaniel Banks, in plea he couldn't abandon an untenable position.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1718660
#99. I've never shown anybody a draft of anything.

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1733222
#100. 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 run past, the way you wouldn't want to be near someone who had something catching, like smallpox

Shelby Foote

Foote's Quotes #1769906

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