The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
BERNARD DEVOTOOne may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification.
BERNARD DEVOTOIt 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 DEVOTOThis 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 DEVOTOThe trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
BERNARD DEVOTOBetween the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe 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 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.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe 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.
BERNARD DEVOTOYou can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
BERNARD DEVOTOA 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.
BERNARD DEVOTOWhen 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 DEVOTOYou 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 DEVOTOThe 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