Quotes from Shelby Foote

Fortuity itself, as the deadly game unfolded move by move, appeared to conform to a pattern of hard luck; so much so, indeed, that in time men would say of Lee, as Jael had said of Sisera after she drove the tent peg into his temple, that the stars in their courses had fought against him.

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

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 days before the increased popularity of cigarettes boosted the fortune) could look forward to something over a million in his own name after three brothers by his father's first wife had got theirs.

These were the red hours of the conflict, hours no man who survived them would forget, even in his sleep, forever after. Fighting thus at arm's length across that parapet, they were caught up in a waking nightmare, although they were mercifully spared the knowledge, at the outset, that it was to last for another sixteen unrelenting hours.

Davis told him, and went on to suggest that necessity be made a virtue and a source of strength.

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

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

severing Sherman's life line he would provoke him into rashness or oblige him to retreat.

Misfortune often develops secret foes," Davis had said in a letter written earlier that week to Lee, "and oftener still makes men complain. It is comfortable to hold someone responsible for one's discomfort.

alone producing over sixty percent more manufactured goods than the whole Confederacy

been illogically arrived at; it had not; but the logic, such as it was, was based insubstantially on hope.

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 did not know which was worse, the chuckling or the blows; there was something terribly unmanly about being on the receiving end of either. But he looked forward to a time when he could repay her, could laugh at her or strike her as he saw fit. Thus marriage was already in his mind. Next

Love has failed us. We are essentially, irrevocably alone. Anything that seems to combat that loneliness is a trap-Love is a trap:

What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?" R. M. T. Hunter wanted to know.

Thats the trouble with having money; you think about buying almost anything you see.

For the first time in history, a major assault was launched by commanders whose eyes were fixed on the hands of watches synchronized the night before.

It must have been the sense of having done his whole duty, and expended upon the cause every energy of his being, which enabled him to meet the approaching catastrophe with a calmness which seemed to those around him almost sublime.

The red-haired general was in excellent spirits, having learned that four newspaper reporters had been aboard the towboat that was lost. "They were so deeply laden with weighty matter that they must have sunk," he remarked happily, and added: "In our affliction we can console ourselves with the pious reflection that there are plenty more of the same sort.

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 stopped thinking about it is what I finally did. It's what you better do, too. Dont think about it.

He was always on hand for misfortune, among the first to arrive when tragedy struck, and for this reason was known as Light Hearse Harry.

The issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question whether Ã¢â'¬Â¦ a government of the people, by the same people, can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes.

Lincoln's jogtrot prose, compacted of words and phrases still with the bark on, had no music their ears were attuned to; it crept by them.

Who can tell? Together, with God's blessing — which surely He will not withhold — you may perhaps be laying the groundwork, the foundation for a future Athens, an Athens of the South. Yes. And this young woman's child, so soon to be born," he added, indicating Ella with a deferential nod, "will be one of its leading citizens, the one perhaps under whom it will come to flower, a beacon for the South, a torch held out.

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 at such an age—a change of life: they get to thinking how much theyve missed, and they get scared. Just wait, I told myself, lying alone in bed those nights (it was June by then); it will play out on him soon enough.