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Shelby Foote QUOTES

Shelby Foote QUOTES

1 " Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience. "

― Shelby Foote , The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

2 " Right now I'm thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery, another was emancipation. It's a paradox. In theory, emancipation was one of the glories of our democracy - and it was. But the way it was done led to tragedy, turning four million people loose with no jobs or trades or learning. And then in 1877 for a few electoral votes, just abandoning them entirely. A huge amount of pain and trouble resulted. Everybody in America is still paying for it. "

― Shelby Foote

3 " 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

4 " 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

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

― Shelby Foote

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

― Shelby Foote

7 " The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them. "

― Shelby Foote , The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

8 " 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 , The Civil War: A Narrative

9 " They took it for more than it was, or anyhow for more than it said; the container was greater than the thing contained, and Lincoln became at once what he would remain for them, “the man who freed the slaves.” He would go down to posterity, not primarily as the Preserver of the Republic-which he was-but as the Great Emancipator, which he was not. "

― Shelby Foote , The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

10 " Not married until 33, Abraham Lincoln said, "A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that cannot hurt me. "

― Shelby Foote , The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

11 " 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 , The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

12 " On Lee as commander: "He had a cheerful dignity and could praise them (his men) without seeming to court their favor. "

― Shelby Foote , The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

13 " A visitor asked Lincoln what good news he could take home from an audience with the august executive. The president spun a story about a machine that baffled a chess champion by beating him thrice. The stunned champ cried while inspecting the machine, "There's a man in there!"Lincoln's good news, he confided from the heights of leadership, was that there was in fact a man in there. "

― Shelby Foote , The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

14 " 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 , Follow Me Down

15 " 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 , The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

16 " 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 , The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

17 " I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land, but that something in the Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this land, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. "

― Shelby Foote , The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

18 " Later they took him to Jackson and that explained it; he was crazy. "

― Shelby Foote , Follow Me Down

19 " They burnt crosses every night all around us, and a man who'll burn what he prays to, he’ll burn anything. "

― Shelby Foote , Jordan County

20 " Whatever shortcomings they might develop under pressure (Grant’s, for instance, was said to be whiskey; hearing which, the President was supposed to have asked what brand he drank, intending to send a barrel each to all his other generals) "

― Shelby Foote , The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville