Quotes from Shelby Foote

Man is characterized by a number of things - one of 'em is he is the only animal that knows he's going to die someday.

It's true we have an affinity for evil. What she told me had occurred in an atmosphere much like that of Troilus and Cressida, in which the faithful are betrayed and the brave are slain. I was reminded of Emerson's "Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

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.

hand. "Goodbye," he said. "I hope you will feel perfectly easy about having nominated me. Don't be troubled about it. I forgive you.

he who has the right needs not to fear.

There was no safety for the survivors until they regained the cover of their artillery, which promptly drove the pursuers back with severe losses and shift without delay to the rebel batteries, blanketing them so accurately with shell-bursts that the fire drew an indirect compliment from Pelham himself, who happened to be visiting this part of the line at the time. Well, you men stand killing better than any I ever saw, he remarked as he watched the cannoneers being knocked about. (p. 37).

General Robert E Lee at the Battle of Fredericksburg: It is well that war is so terrible, the gray-bearded general said. "We should grow too fond of it. (p. 37)

Grant agreed at least with the final sentence - which he later paraphrased and sharpened into a maxim: 'Two commanders on the same field are always one too many.' (p. 188)

Next morning at breakfast he paid Mamma four hundred dollars, cash on the table, for that one night. I watched him count the money out of his wallet, and while I watched I thought what a good thing it was I hadnt told even Mamma about the altar boys those times in the sacristy, behind the stacks of missals. All told, she got twelve hundred dollars for just the last three weeks of June, plus Pullman tickets for both of us back to New Orleans.

They played the things Duff had learned while crouching under Bantam Street windows, the old songs that had been great before some of the boys were born, things never set down on paper but kept alive in places and in memories such as these.

I never cared what kind of grade I got.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.

I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears.

I can't begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.

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.