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 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.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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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 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.
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Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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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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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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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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Art is man determined to die sane.
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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. It marks the lifeward turn.
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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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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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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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The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
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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