Love Quote by Shelby Foote

Novelty is Foote's chosen drug name for modern restlessness, and he writes about it with the cool authority of someone who watched Americans turn appetite into identity. The lines move like a miniature epic: desire ("the love of novelty") graduates immediately into motion ("from realm to realm we roam"), then hardens into infrastructure ("Our fleets"). What starts as a private itch becomes a civilizational supply chain.

The intent is less moral scolding than diagnosis. Foote frames novelty not as curiosity - an engine of discovery - but as a ruling passion, a kind of soft tyranny. "Most rules the mind" is bluntly political language; it treats consumer impulse like a sovereign. By the time the ships return, they're not bearing treasure or knowledge but "every folly", a savage little twist that turns exploration into hoarding and upgrades into self-inflicted clutter. The word "loaded" does double duty: materially full, spiritually burdened.

Context matters. Foote, best known for narrating the American Civil War, understood how societies romanticize their forward motion while smuggling in new forms of dependence. Read against 20th-century America - advertising, mass travel, globalized goods, the constant churn of trends - the "fleets" look less like galleons than cargo ships, TV schedules, even the endless refresh of media. The subtext: we keep calling it progress because it feels like movement, when it may be avoidance dressed as adventure. Novelty promises a fresh start; Foote suggests it mostly delivers fresh distractions, hauled home like trophies we can't eat.