Shelby Foote Quotes

I would wake up in Moscow or somewhere else, my heart beating fast, feeling bitter and helpless.

When I walked out of the seminary, I was 31, but I was like a scared, frightened kid. I had no place to live, no license, no clothes. I was just a lost soul.

Alone! Alone! No beacon, far or near! No chart, no compass, and no anchor stay!

One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

Though we are more prosperous a nation and more connected a global community than ever before, many of us still feel lonely, disoriented and uncertain of the future.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.

I love all waste and solitary places.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

Certainly on the vast windy plain, there was plenty of nothing to be looked at.

If I am ever to find these trees meaningful I must have you by the hand. As it is, they stretch dusty fingers into an obscure sky, and the snow looks up like a face dirtied with tears. Should I cry out and see what happens? There could only be a stranger wandering in this landscape, cold, unfortunate, himself frozen fast in wintry eyes.

When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost.

I have gone into the waste lonely places

The sailor cannot see the north / but knows the needle can.

About midnight the fog shut down again denser than before. One could almost "stand on it." It continued so for a number of days, the wind increasing to a gale. The waves rose high, but I had a good ship. Still, in the dismal fog I felt myself drifting into loneliness, an insect on the straw in the midst of the elements.

Everyone's moving on without me, into a world I don't understand.

I always have a sense of trembling, but so does a compass, after all.

The rain is falling ever harder, and all I can hear is the sound of the water. I’m drenched, but I can’t move. I don’t want to leave, because I don’t know where to go

These are frightening times...when she feels herself annointed by loneliness.

Sometimes I feel so- I don’t know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going’ Like a little lost Sputnik?’ I guess so.

I know one thing for certain; it is much harder to tell whether you are lost than whether you were lost, for, on many occasions, where you are going is exactly where you are. On the other hand, if you often find that where you've been is not at all where you should have gone, and, since it's much more difficult to find your way back from someplace you've never left, I suggest you go there immediately and then decide.

I don't know why it's called "getting lost." Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turnd to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected to be.

Where are you now?’ Where was I now? Gripping the receiver, I raised my hand and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.

If I faltered, there would be no arms to hold me and the world would be a cold and forbidding place.