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

Tags: history american-civil-war history-of-the-united-states



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

Shelby Foote

Tags: college library university



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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

Tags: civil-war-narrative



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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

Tags: politics abraham-lincoln slavery american-civil-war politics-of-the-united-states slavery-in-america slavery-in-the-united-states



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

Shelby Foote

Tags: perfection boredom utopia



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

Shelby Foote

Tags: mississippi mississippi-authors mississippi-writers



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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

Tags: mississippi mississippi-authors mississippi-writers



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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

Tags: american-civil-war



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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

Tags: fear humility stoicism candor



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

Shelby Foote

Tags: marriage abraham-lincoln singleness abraham-lincoln-quotes



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