Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
BERNARD DEVOTOArt is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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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 mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
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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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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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Art is man determined to die sane.
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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 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.
BERNARD DEVOTO