The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.
BERNARD DEVOTOYou can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest-lived.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
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Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
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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.
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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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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 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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The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
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The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
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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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The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
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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 best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
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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.
BERNARD DEVOTO