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The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.

Bernard DeVoto

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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Average Lines Twenties
You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
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Kissing Martini Refrigerator
New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. . . .
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Civilization Destiny Life
Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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Done Onions People
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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Food Heart Promise Season Sense Wall
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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Airplane Automatism Game Organisation Pilot Player Tennis
Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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Armistice Art Fate
Art is man determined to die sane.
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Art Determined Men
A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.
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Mad May Novelists
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.
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Altogether Campground Coma Pulse Strengthening Weaken
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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Impact Inheritance May
Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
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Airplane Player Wisdom
The water of life was given to us to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger than without its vision there is any evidence we are.
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Evidence Generosity Life Men
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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Believe Food Heart Lifeward
History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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Art History Philosophy
The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
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Reason Refuse Trouble

The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.

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The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.

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