“It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.”
Interviewed in the documentary series The Civil War, 1990
Context: Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.
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Shelby Foote 16
Novelist, historian 1916–2005Related quotes
Source: Outlaw Journalist (2008), Chapter 3, The Dark Thumb Of Fate, p. 47
More Than Just Comfort: An Answer to Cancer (c. 1979)
“Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is.”
Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 21
“Ruling hell might be better than being a subject in hell, but not by much.”
Other
Two Years Later: Mexico City Return
Queer: A Novel (1985)
Cited in: Tuomas Tepora, The Finnish Civil War 1918: History, Memory, Legacy, 2014, p. 191
“Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.”
The Second Coming (1980)
