Quotes & Sayings About Footnotes

Exceptions to the traditions of dumpy dignity and fake learnedness in law review writing are as rare as they are beautiful. Once in a while a Thomas Reed Powell gets away with an imaginary judicial opinion that gives a real twist to the lion's tail. Once in a while a Thurman Arnold forgets his footnotes as though to say that if people do not believe or understand him that is their worry and not his. But even such mild breaches of etiquette as these are tolerated gingerly and seldom, and are likely to be looked at a little askance by the writers' more pious brethren. — Fred Rodell

I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me. — Mary Roach

No matter what I've published - and you can look it up, I've published quite a lot in science, quite a few books too - none of it's very important. All will be forgotten and in a few years time will be a few comments in eight-point type in footnotes at the bottom of the page somewhere. — Robert Winston

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece — Vladimir Nabokov

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

Trust-me companies are companies whose financial results gallop ahead of their businesses, companies with seemingly perfect control over their quarterly sales and profits. Companies whose financial statements are loaded with footnotes: companies that short-sellers often attack but rarely dent. — Alex Berenson

Read the book through, undeterred and undismayed by the paragraphs, footnotes, comments, and references that escape you. If you let yourself get stalled, if you allow yourself to be tripped up by any one of these stumbling blocks, you are lost. — Mortimer J. Adler

Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I'll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say. — Angela Carter

Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable. — Terence McKenna

Meaning 'by way of the anus'. 'Per Annum', with two n's, means 'yearly'. The correct answer to the question, 'What is the birthrate per anum?' is zero (one hopes). — Mary Roach

But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapter, started out simply as a joke. Who but a biblical scholar would think of footnoting an autobiography? But the joke quickly got out of hand and become a significant part of that chapter. I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a single sentence and a twenty-page footnote. — Jeffrey L. Staley

Innovation is a good thing. The human condition - put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes - is improving because of innovation. — Bill Gates

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

It was the usual sort of academic battle: footnotes at ten paces, bolstered by snide articles in academic journals and lots of sniping about methodology, a thrust and parry of source and countersource. My sources had to be better. — Lauren Willig

Footnotes for Lamentations — Anonymous

For the first lesson, I want you to play over every column of Modern Chess Openings, including the footnotes. And for the next lesson, I want you to do it again. — Bobby Fischer

We had to keep explaining things, backtracking and filling gaps. We realised our own conversations had evolved into a kind of shorthand, a tidy, neat little minimalism. Covering the whole canvas in broad obvious brushstrokes for outsiders felt like a waste of sounds, time and effort. Speaking with footnotes. — Steven Hall

Rohan's fingertips drifted with stunning delicacy over her throat, behind her ear, pushing into the satiny warmth of her hair. "You are an interesting woman Amelia."
Gooseflesh rose wherever his breath touched. "I can't f-fathom why you would think so."
His playful mouth traced the wing of her brow. "I find you thoroughly, deeply interesting. I want to open you like a book and read every page." A smile curved the corners of his lips as he added huskily, "Footnotes included. — Lisa Kleypas

Some say that inside every scholar there is a romantic, trying to get out. That may not be entirely true, but there is much truth in it. It is to such scholars that we owe the preservation of ancient beliefs in magic and witchcraft in a materialistic twentieth century, and many of them more than half believe in these things, cloaking their unfashionable faith behind the impeccable bibliographical apparatus of names, dates and footnotes. — Leslie Shepard

It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it. — Fulton J. Sheen

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

Following the footnotes of a Lincoln book can drive you towards madness. But it also gives you the chance to spend days trying to determine whether Lincoln might have actually taken a ride on a flying piano, and that's a damned interesting way to spend one's working life. — Adam Selzer

If we forget that the newspapers are footnotes to Scripture and not the other way around, we will finally be afraid to get out of bed in the morning. Too many of us spend far too much time with the editorial page and not nearly enough with the prophetic vision. We get our interpretation of politics and economics and morals from journalists when we should be getting only information; the meaning of the world is most accurately given to us by God's Word. — Eugene H. Peterson

When Charlie and I finish reading the long footnotes detailing the derivatives activities of major banks, the only thing we understand is that we don't understand how much risk the institution is running. — Warren Buffett

But there are certain books I would never put on a Kindle because you want to be able to look at graphs and photos or the footnotes and maps. You can't see that. — Lisa See

Equality means equality for all- no exceptions, no 'yes, buts', no asterisked footnotes imposing limits. — Hubert H. Humphrey

The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous. — Mary Roach

Like the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, postmodernism seeks to institutionalize dishonesty as a legitimate school of thought. The idea of truth as the ultimate goal of the intellectual is discarded. In its place, scholars are asked to pursue political objectives
so long as those political objectives are the 'correct' ones. Postmodernism is not fringe within the community of scholars. It is central. This tells us a great deal about the life of the mind today. Peruse any university course catalogue, and you find names like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. Scour the footnotes of scholarly books and journals and a similar story unfolds. With the primacy of philosophies
postmodernism, Critical Theory, and even the right-leaning Straussianism
that exalt dishonesty in the service of supposedly noble causes, is it at all surprising that liars like Alfred Kinsey, Rigoberta Menchu, Alger Hiss, and Margaret Sanger have achieved a venerated status among the intellectuals? — Daniel J. Flynn

Footnotes
little dogs yapping at the heels of the text — William James

He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn't about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end. He just runs. Rain grows in wet crescendo. His footfalls send up fine flowers of water, hanging a second behind his flight. — Thomas Pynchon

Think about it: you've already related it down to something that somebody else can understand. If art relates to something - it's like Picasso, it's like Mondrian - it's not. Art's supposed to be what it is. Using a reference of art history might help for some kind of sales, but it doesn't really help anybody. Art is what it is; it cannot be footnoted, until it enters the world. Then it has a history. Then the footnotes are the history, not the explanation. — Lawrence Weiner

History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes. — Paul Eldridge

Unconditional love is a gift of the heart. It's a gift that we can both give and receive that comes with no strings attached, no qualifications, reservations, footnotes, asterisks, objections, judgments, or other kinds of fine print legalese that later have to be uncovered, argued over, or cried about. — Catherine Carrigan

I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a signboard had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good. — Vladimir Nabokov

When I first opened this book and saw all those scholarly footnotes, my heart leapt up as though I saw a host of golden daffodils. — Steven Moore

If I may bend your ear for a moment, I like Terry Pratchett. I like footnotes. I like footnotes even when they are not as entertaining as a Pratchett footnote, even when they are in the middle of a book on evolutionary biology and briefly explain the Red Queen hypothesis or the fate of the Stephen's Island Wren or how many bunnies can dance on the back of Australia. Footnotes fill me with a very mild glee. The endnote simply does not compare. — Ursula Vernon

I didn't want to tell you I'd been scared, much less why. I guess that was stupid."
"It was."
"Aren't you supposed to say something like 'no, it wasn't. Blah, blah, support, stroke, let me get you some chocolate'?"
"You haven't red the marriage handbook's footnotes. It's another woman who does that sort of thing. I believe I'm allowed to be more blunt, then ask if you'd like a quick shag."
"Shag yourself — J.D. Robb

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

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

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

Whether he chooses a 'scholarly' or a 'popular' edition the modern reader is likely to have his judgement influenced in advance. Almost invariably he will be offered an assisted passage. Footnotes, Forewords, Afterwords serve notice that a given text is intellectually taxing - that he is likely to need help. Such apparatus is likely to
be a positive disincentive to casual reading. But a cheaper edition may offer interference of another kind. Reminders, in words or pictures, of Julie Christie's Bathsheba Everdene or Michael York's Pip can perhaps create a beguiling sense of accessibility. But they
may also pre-empt the imaginative responses of the reader. — Ian Gregor

Never upstage a man. Don't top his joke, even if you have to bite your tongue to keep from doing it. Never launch loudly into your own opinions on a subject - whether it's petunias or politics. Instead, draw out his ideas to which you can gracefully add your footnotes from time to time. — Arlene Dahl

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small. — Henry Louis Gates

He's a book full of footnotes brought to life. He's a jacket made of elbow patches. — Rainbow Rowell

There is a lot of folklore about equestrian statues, especially the ones with riders on them. There is said to be a code in the number and placement of the horse's hooves: If one of the horse's hooves is in the air, the rider was wounded in battle; two legs in the air means that the rider was killed in battle; three legs in the air indicates that the rider got lost on the way to the battle; and four legs in the air means that the sculptor was very, very clever. Five legs in the air means that there's probably at least one other horse standing behind the horse you're looking at; and the rider lying on the ground with his horse lying on top of him with all four legs in the air means that the rider was either a very incompetent horseman or owned a very bad-tempered horse. — Terry Pratchett

It's a really diverse time in music, with all these different DJs and all these different categories, and we are all taking footnotes from everyone else. There are no real genre boundaries anymore; you can take a trance idea and put it into a trap record - it's not that uncommon. — Steve Aoki

It's the same way that when the car got going, people thought it would be an electric car, people thought it would be a steam car. Actually, the dark horse in that race was internal combustion, but because of the energy density of gasoline and discovery of oil in large amounts at that point in first Pennsylvania and then Texas, it won out over those other two, to the point that those other two are actually viewed as obscure footnotes in history. — Bill Gates

Moeller, who has tasted a naked Cheeto, likens it to a piece of unsweetened puffed corn cereal — Mary Roach

Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn't say their didn't shore it up with footnotes and research. — China Mieville

The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems, especially the classics of our language, should be read headlong. Dubieties may be looked up later. — Peter Porter

The worst way to release bad news is to bury it in the financial statement footnotes, in the hope that no one will see it. A diligent investor or analyst always reads the footnotes, and will not appreciate having to dig so deep to uncover potentially critical information. — Steven M. Bragg

But to me, each revision of the document simply showed how far the initial Flevel implementation had progressed. Those parts of the language that were not yet implemented were still described in free-flowing flowery prose giving promise of unalloyed delight. In the parts that had been implemented, the flowers had withered; they were choked by an undergrowth of explanatory footnotes, placing arbitrary and unpleasant restrictions on the use of each feature and loading upon a programmer the responsibility for controlling the complex and unexpected side-effects and interaction effects with all the other features of the language. — C.A.R. Hoare

We all know how it went when Europe changed from a culture addicted to depressants to one high on stimulants [...] Within two hundred years of Europe's first cup, famine and the plague were historical footnotes. Governments became more democratic, slavery vanished, and the standards of living and literacy went through the roof. War became less frequent and more horrible. — Stewart Lee Allen

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

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

As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and one-time variations as there were rules. These Exceptions were indicated by rows of asterisks and daggers and other more obscure typographical fauna which invited the reader to peruse the many footnotes that cluttered up the margins of magical reference books like Talmudic commentary. — Lev Grossman

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. — Alfred North Whitehead

For the young Gaels of Ireland
Are the lads that drive me mad,
For half their words need footnotes
And half their rhymes are bad. — Arthur Guiterman

But this is an occupational hazard of being a scientist. You say this is the best information I have and then you realize that not everyone is going to read the footnotes or the whole book, so people are going to get the wrong impression. — Bjorn Lomborg

When I started researching history in the 1960s, a lot of women about whom I've subsequently written were actually footnotes to history. There was a perception that women weren't important. And it's true. Women were seen historically as far inferior to men. — Alison Weir

I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else's life. — Martha Gellhorn

Sometimes it seems like there's more footnotes than text. This isn't something we're proud of, and over time we'd like to see our footnotes steadily shrink. — Barry Diller

The world needs only a few geniuses; civilization is maintained and extended by those lesser souls who corral the men of greatness, tie them down with explanations and footnotes and annotated editions, explain what they meant when they didn't know themselves, show their true place in the awesome progression of mankind. — Iain Pears

To us to-day this period of transition, with its mediaeval mixture of commerce, religion, and war, of emotion and logic, of admiration for St. Augustine and belief in the infallibility of Aristotle, looks extremely odd. We forget that our generation may be in danger of similar criticism. Odd or not, this was the state of Italy in the period preceding that great burst of the arts and intellectual life known as the Renaissance. FOOTNOTES: — Henry Dwight Sedgwick

Contrary to what we conclude naturally, the gospel is not too good to be true. It is true! It's the truest truth in the entire universe. No strings attached! No fine print to read. No buts. No conditions. No qualifications. No footnotes. And especially, no need for balance. — Tullian Tchividjian

I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: "It was the footnotes". — Joanna Russ

A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like 'arraigned,' 'curried' and 'exculpate' meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation. — Thomas Sowell

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

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

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. Line — Vladimir Nabokov

Most of the world's ills, it seemed to him, were caused by men who believed themselves important: on a good day it always ended in tears, on a bad day in global destruction. Oliver was not a man to start a war or provoke pestilence: his icons were the makers of music, the tellers of tales, the clowns and the balladeers, and all who celebrated life's footnotes, appendices and afterthoughts.
Little Brown, London, 1994. — Alan Plater

They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator's prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard's own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. — John Updike

THE OLD ARE LIKE BOOKS

The old are like books, crack-spined,
Their foxed pages dogeared at favorite paragraphs
While whole chapters have been forgotten.
Each cover scuffed, dust-jackets lost,
Titles alluding to something long out of style,
Prose suffering from an overuse of footnotes,
Occasional longueurs, over-repetitions of the main theme,
But overall, unique and idiosyncratic tales.
Of another era, but preface to this. — David Andrew Westwood

Novelists never have to footnote. — Jane Smiley

I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text. And I see that I am now using a long footnote to open a serious subject - shifting in a quick move to Paris, to a penthouse in the Hotel Crillon. Early June. Breakfast time. The host is my good friend Professor Ravelstein, Abe Ravelstein. My wife and I, also staying at the Crillon, have a room below, on the sixth floor. She is still asleep. The entire floor below ours (this is not absolutely relevant but somehow I can't avoid mentioning it) is occupied just now by Michael Jackson and his entourage. He performs nightly in some vast Parisian auditorium. Very soon his French fans will arrive and a crowd of faces will be turned upward, shouting in unison, 'Miekell Jack-sown'. A police barrier holds the fans back. Inside, from the sixth floor, when you look down the marble stairwell you see Michael's bodyguards. One of them is doing the crossword puzzle in the 'Paris Herald'. — Saul Bellow

Someone once said that "The Waste Land" was a scum of poetry floating on a sea of footnotes. That resonated with me, because that's kind of what I was doing lyrically for a while. I was being very referential in a way. I would drop in these little phrases or ideas that were sort of portholes into a whole bigger realm of thought or whatever, that would work within the song, but that you could also poke through into a bigger discussion. — Ted Leo

When I am a writer, I shall do parenthetical asides. And footnotes. There will be footnotes. I wonder how you do them? And italics. How do you make italics happen? — Neil Gaiman

Far too often, historians treat African Americans as if white segregationists had succeeded, as if blacks lived in their own separate world, physically and culturally removed from everyone else. In effect, African Americans become segregated for a second time in the telling of their history, easily marginalized from the main American story, relegated to the footnotes. — Shane White

The best journalism is sometimes about footnotes - when we write small to say something big. — Anthony Shadid

One cannot write about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without considering the footnotes. The experienced reader is conditioned to see footnotes as dry, as a way of grounding the text in reality. But footnotes are also an intervention, or intrusion into the flow of the text, and Clarke takes advantage of this figuring. In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it is in the footnotes that the world of the fantastic slips through to disrupt the meaning or common understanding of the tale told in the main text. The "explanation" they offer is of worlds slipping between each other, of uncontrolled contact with fairy. — Farah Mendlesohn

[Footnote:] Pliny the Elder perished in 79 A.D. when he refused to flee from the great eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, insisting that everything would be all right. It wasn't. — Will Cuppy

One of my favorite footnotes in the hypochondria book [The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death.] was about the death of one of the King Charleses. He was essentially bled and vomited to death by his doctors. They also drilled holes in his head. — Gene Weingarten

If you look into the footnotes of the business model for Apple Computer you'll see that they actually give the computers away for free; they just charge for the inflated sense of self-worth. — Christian Lander

Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read. — Alexander Chee

As illustrated in any number of footnotes, men are almost always 50 to 60 percent dumber in matters involving their crotch. — Scott Hawkins

Their mother died early, and not in a good way. Not that anyone dies in a good way, Tin footnotes to himself, but there are degrees. Being hit by a truck after closing time while jaywalking blinded with mournful tears was not a good way. Though it was quick. — Margaret Atwood