Top 70 Shelby Foote Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Shelby Foote

2. “A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight...”

— Shelby Foote

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

— Shelby Foote

4. “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

5. “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

6. “A fact is not a truth until you love it.”

— Shelby Foote

7. “I’ve never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn’t superior to distortion in every way.”

— Shelby Foote

8. “If you want to study writing, read Dickens.”

— Shelby Foote

9. “They burnt crosses every night all around us, and a man who’ll burn what he prays to, he’ll burn anything.”

— Shelby Foote

10. “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

11. “People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.”

— Shelby Foote

12. “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

13. “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.”

— Shelby Foote

14. “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

15. “For my part I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapacity of the people to govern themselves.”

— Shelby Foote

16. “Writing is very hard work and knowing what you’re doing the whole time.”

— Shelby Foote

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Longevity conquers scandal every time.”

— Shelby Foote

22. “A combination of all that was best in the gladdest days of the departing year...”

— Shelby Foote

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience.”

— Shelby Foote

28. “I could see their faces then, and the army became what it really was: forty thousand men – they were young men mostly, lots of them even younger than myself, and I was nineteen just two weeks before – out on their first march in the crazy weather of early April, going from Mississippi into Tennessee where the Union army was camped between two creeks with its back to a river, inviting destruction.”

— Shelby Foote

29. “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

30. “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

31. “When General Johnston had heard them out, he drew himself up in the saddle, leather creaking, and said quietly: “Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight tomorrow.”

— Shelby Foote

32. “When protests reached Lincoln he turned them aside with a medical analogy, pointing out that a limb must sometimes he amputated to save a life but that a life must never be given to save a limb; he felt, he said, “that measures, however unconstitutional, might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation.”

— Shelby Foote

33. “When you’re working very hard you’re not lonely; you are the whole damn world.”

— Shelby Foote

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

— Shelby Foote

35. “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

36. “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

37. “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought.”

— Shelby Foote

38. “Aboard a Chesapeake Bay steamer, not long after his surrender, the general heard a fellow passenger insisting that the South had been “conquered but not subdued.” Asked in what command he had served, the bellicose young man – one of those stalwarts later classified as “invisible in war and invincible in peace” – replied that, unfortunately, circumstances had made it impossible for him to be in the army. “Well, sir, I was,” Johnston told him. “You may not be subdued, but I am.”

— Shelby Foote

39. “I’ve never shown anybody a draft of anything.”

— Shelby Foote

40. “That was when General Johnston rode up. He came right past where I was standing, a fine big man on a bay stallion. He had on a broad-brim hat and a cape and thigh boots with gold spurs that twinkled like sparks of fire. I watched him ride by, his mustache flaring out from his mouth and his eyes set deep under his forehead. He was certainly the handsomest man I ever saw, bar none; he made the other officers on his staff look small.”

— Shelby Foote

41. “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

42. “They nodded their heads with quick flicky motions, like birds, and nursed their rifles, keeping them out of the dirt. I had gotten to know them all in a month and a few of them were even from the same end of the county I was, but now it was like I was seeing them for the first time, different. All the put-on had gone out of their faces – they were left with what God gave them at the beginning.”

— Shelby Foote

43. “I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.”

— Shelby Foote

44. “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

45. “She’d rouse me out of bed all hours of the night and I’d wait in the hall. They were mostly soldiers and sailors and merchant mariners, or businessmen down on convention. This is one lousy life, Mamma said, but I’m doing the best I can with what Ive got. I wish I could afford to send you to some kind of business school so you could learn to type. – She never did but I never blamed her. For one thing, she only turned the nicest ones over to me, the businessmen.”

— Shelby Foote

46. “Isn’t it odd, the attractiveness of type and paper and ink, bodying thoughts and descriptions? Isn’t it odd how much the sight can teach us about writing? Commas really look like commas in print.”

— Shelby Foote

47. “Back home the election was over; the country had a new president: ‘Mr Roosevelt’ he was called at first, then ‘Roosevelt,’ then ‘that Roosevelt,’ and finally just ‘he’ or ‘him’ by mouths that twisted bitterly on the pronoun, for the westering boats were crowded with expatriates – “A traitor to his class,” they said.”

— Shelby Foote

48. “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

49. “This was mainly a brown country, cluttered with dead leaves from the year before, but the oaks had tasseled and the redbud limbs were like flames in the wind. Fruit trees in cabin yards, peach and pear and occasional quince, were sheathed with bloom, white and pink, twinkling against broken fields and random cuts of new grass washed clean by the rain.”

— Shelby Foote

50. “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