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 DEVOTOThe only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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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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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 trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
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The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
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The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
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Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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Art is man determined to die sane.
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The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
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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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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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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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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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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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The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
BERNARD DEVOTO