Top 51 Shelby Foote Quotes
#1. Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.
Shelby Foote
#2. I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.
Shelby Foote
#3. I can't begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.
Shelby Foote
#4. A rich man's war and a poor man's fight ...
Shelby Foote
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. A combination of all that was best in the gladdest days of the departing year ...
Shelby Foote
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.
Shelby Foote
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I've never shown anybody a draft of anything.
Shelby Foote
#19. I've never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn't superior to distortion in every way.
Shelby Foote
#20. As a Southerner I would have to say that one of the main importances of the War is that Southerners have a sense of defeat which none of the rest of the country has.
Shelby Foote
#21. 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
#22. Shiloh is a wonderfully dramatic battle. The leader of one side is killed, and the other one is going on to glory, and it was the first great battle. It lasted two days.
Shelby Foote
#23. When you're working very hard you're not lonely; you are the whole damn world.
Shelby Foote
#24. Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience.
Shelby Foote
#25. There are people one knows and people one doesn't. One shouldn't cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter.
Tony Horwitz
#26. Later they took him to Jackson and that explained it; he was crazy.
Shelby Foote
#27. Most of my inspiration, if that's the word, came from books themselves.
Shelby Foote
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. On Lee as commander: He had a cheerful dignity and could praise them (his men) without seeming to court their favor.
Shelby Foote
#36. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Not married until 33, Abraham Lincoln said, A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that cannot hurt me.
Shelby Foote
#45. 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
#46. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears.
Shelby Foote
#51. 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
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