Quotes About Footnotes

The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems, especially the classics of our language, should be read headlong. Dubieties may be looked up later.

Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes.

For an article, I only needed to read the first and last paragraphs followed by the initial sentence of each remaining paragraph, writing down pertinent dates and facts as I went. Finally, I had to make sure to read the foot- or endnotes to the article and circle back, because those would point to important information in the text.

With daffodils mad footnotes for the spring, And asters purple asterisks for autumn -

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

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.

They told the truth, but they buried it so deep in the footnotes of scientific reports and the jargon of obscure journals that almost none of it could emerge to penetrate public consciousness.

Cooking is so infinitely nuanced that to write completely about how to cook any dish would require a manuscript longer than a David Foster Wallace novel and include twice as many footnotes within twice as many endnotes. And then no one would be able to follow it, let alone cook from it.

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

History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes.