Footnotes Quotes

• Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Inspirational, Funny, Life

  Pale Fire "Commentary" (1962)

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• So, that notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms.

  Ted Nelson

  Struggle, Cat, Ideas

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• The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Plato, Philosophical, Knowledge

  Process and Reality pt. 2, ch. 1 (1929)

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• The son has always felt like he was a footnote in one of the stories the father tells. The father is an amazing storyteller and one of the tales that he tells is how he met his wife.

  Danny DeVito

  Father, Son, Wife

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• A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can only be a footnote.

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko

  History, Poetry, Poetic

  "A Precocious Autobiography". Translated from the Russian by Andrew R. MacAndrew,

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• History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes.

  Paul Eldridge

  History, Transformation, Quiet

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• The footnote would seem to be the smallest detail in a work of history. Yet it carries a large burden of responsibility, testifying to the validity of the work, the integrity (and the humility) of the historian, and to the dignity of the discipline.

  Gertrude Himmelfarb

  Integrity, Humility, Responsibility

  Gertrude Himmelfarb (1995). “On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society”, Vintage

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• Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Change, Time, Memories

  1979 General election campaign speech, Bolton, 2 May.

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• Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.

  Noel Coward

  Doors, Making Love, Answers

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• Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

  Nicholson Baker

  Book, Reading, Reality

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• If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Life Is, Obscure, Poet

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1968). “Pale fire”, Berkley

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• I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.

  David Foster Wallace

  Fun, Thinking, Littles

  Source: www.slate.com

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• There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

  George Santayana

  Book, Hands, Interesting

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana”

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• Nothing in these abstract economic models actually works in the real world. It doesn't matter how many footnotes they put in, or how many ways they tinker around the edges. The whole enterprise is totally rotten at the core: it has no relation to reality.

  Noam Chomsky

  Real, Economic Models, Rotten

  "Understanding Power". Book by Noam Chomsky, 2002.

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• If there was one thing I refused to be, it was an insignificant footnote in some boy's history.

  Justina Chen

  Boys, One Thing, Ifs

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• One day America and all its presidents will be a footnote in history, but the kingdom of Jesus will never end.

  John Piper

  Jesus, America, One Day

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• The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

  John Updike

  Emotional, Agreement, Stories

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• An Ant on a hot stove-lid runs faster than an Ant on a cold one. Who wouldn't?

  Will Cuppy

  Running, Hot, Ants

  "Insects for Everybody". "How to Attract the Wombat". Book by Will Cuppy, 1949.

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• The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Weight, Baggage, Human Relations

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1984). “Bartleby in Manhattan, and Other Essays”, Vintage

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• [Footnote:] The Dotterel weighs only four ounces. It has long been a scientific riddle how so much wrong-headedness can manage to exist in so small a space. Still, there's the Least Gnatcatcher.

  Will Cuppy

  Space, Long, Four

  "How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes". Book by Will Cuppy, 1931.

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• [Footnote:] To give the Beaver his due, he does things because he has to do them, not because he believes that hard work per se will somehow make him a better Beaver -- the Beaver may be dumb, but he is not that dumb! The Beaver was made to gnaw, and gnaw he does. There you have him in a nutshell.

  Will Cuppy

  Believe, Hard Work, Giving

  "How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes". Book by Will Cuppy, 1931.

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• [Footnote:]Each male has from 2 to 790 females with whom he discusses current events. Of these he marries from 3 to 17.

  Will Cuppy

  Males, Events, Female

  "How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes". Book by Will Cuppy, 1931.

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• The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas, and all we've been producing is footnotes.

  Theodore White

  Jobs, Ideas, Come Up

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• Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Voice, People

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• Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. Remarking on the complexity of Ptolemaic model of the universe after it was explained to him. Footnote: Carlyle says, in his History of Frederick the Great, book ii. chap. vii. that this saying of Alphonso about Ptolemy's astronomy, 'that it seemed a crank machine; that it was pity the Creator had not taken advice,' is still remembered by mankind, - this and no other of his many sayings.

  Alfonso X of Castile

  Book, Taken, Science

  Said after studying the Ptolemaic system (attributed)

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