Shelby Foote Quotes

Truth is, in fact, an elusive concept. It depends almost entirely on where you are standing at the time. It is a human instinct to confuse belief with truth.

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

When someone starts talking to me about the truth, what I hear is what they're telling me about themselves.

Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.

Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

There is a world of difference between facts and the truth. You can have so many facts that you don't deal with the truth. You never get to the truth. You have the places where, the people who, the times when, the reasons why, the methods how - blah blah. And never get to the human truth. The human truth is as elusive as the air. And as important as the air.

You're really looking for the truth of what the piece is about. And that's going to be different for different people.

People like things that make sense to them; your perspective is your reality.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

We make our own truths and lies....Truths are often lies and lies truths.

The truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.

The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another.

Your version of the truth is all that matters.

An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

Those are facts. Are they the truth? No, for they do not tell you of the heart, and that is where truth lives.

You can't talk about truth unless you talk about yourself.

- This isn't an interrogation or a trail. Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters. -Truth is singular. It's 'versions' are mistruths.

There can be many opinions on a thing, but there is only one truth." Vashet smiled lazily. "And if the pursuit of the truth was my goal, that would concern me." She gave a long yawn, stretching like a happy cat. "Instead I will focus on the joy in my heart, [...}

Truth is a matter of the imagination.

my husband, who is a lawyer, is very careful with words and with the truth. He thinks that the truth exists, and it's something that is beyond questioning, which I think is totally absurd. I have several versions of how we met and how wonderful he was and all that. At least twenty. And I'm sure that they are all true. He has one. And I'm positive that it's not true.