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 DEVOTOThe mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
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.
BERNARD DEVOTO -
Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
BERNARD DEVOTO -
The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
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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 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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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
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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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The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
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The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change 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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The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
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Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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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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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.
BERNARD DEVOTO