122 Quotes by Shelby Foote

A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight...

But it seemed so wrong, so scandalous, somehow so unreligious for a dead man to have to keep on fighting – or running, anyhow – that it made me sick at my stomach. I didn’t want to have any more to do with the war if this was the way it was going to be.

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.

Other trophies included a bundle of captured flags, which he sent to City Point that evening by a special messenger. Lincoln was delighted. “Here is something material,” he said as he unfurled the shot-torn rebel colors; “something I can see, feel, and understand. This means victory. This is victory.

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

In war, as in love – indeed, as in all such areas of so-called human endeavor – expectation tended to outrun execution, particularly when the latter was given a head start in the race, and nowhere did this apply more lamentably, at any rate from the Richmond point of view, than in the wake of Chickamauga, probably the greatest and certainly the bloodiest of all the battles won by the South in its fight for the independence it believed to be its birthright.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens.

I’ve never shown anybody a draft of anything.

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.