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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.

Bernard DeVoto

The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
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Empires Internal People United States
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 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
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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Civilization Condition Country Finish Permanent
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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Government Race Stupid
History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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Art History Philosophy
The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
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Medicine Possibility Teaching
The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
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Dawn False Knowledge
Art is man determined to die sane.
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Art Determined Men
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
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
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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Believe Shadow Watches
Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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Done Onions People
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
You 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.
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Earth Happiest Kissing Life Sudden
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

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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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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