When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the cocktail hour.
BERNARD DEVOTOBetween the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization. . . . A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.
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It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America.
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The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart, the day was not bad, the season has not been bad, there is sense and even promise in going on.
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Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affectations glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn.
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When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn.
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The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
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Art is man determined to die sane.
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One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification.
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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
BERNARD DEVOTO -
You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
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Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows.
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The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. When you reach the line which marks that drop – for convenience, the one hundredth meridian – you have reached the West.
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The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
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The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
BERNARD DEVOTO