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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.

Bernard DeVoto

Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Done Onions People
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.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Believe Food Heart Lifeward
The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
BERNARD DEVOTO

May Paper Writing
The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Reason Refuse Trouble
When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the cocktail hour.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Cocktail Evening Occupation
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.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Government Race Stupid
One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Impact Inheritance May
The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Dawn False Knowledge
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.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Civilization Condition Country Finish Permanent
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

Food Heart Promise Season Sense Wall
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.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Earth Happiest Kissing Life Sudden
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.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Believe Shadow Watches
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. . . .
BERNARD DEVOTO

Civilization Destiny Life
Art is man determined to die sane.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Art Determined Men
The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Individuality Sacred Trouble
The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Empires Internal People United States

Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.

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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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