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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. . . .

Bernard DeVoto

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
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 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 DEVOTO

Airplane Automatism Game Organisation Pilot Player Tennis
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 DEVOTO

Average Lines Twenties
The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
BERNARD DEVOTO

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

Done Onions People
The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Dawn False Knowledge
History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Art History Philosophy
The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Reason Refuse Trouble
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
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.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Mad May Novelists
Art is man determined to die sane.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Art Determined Men
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
You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Kissing Martini Refrigerator
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
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

Evidence Generosity Life Men

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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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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Popular Authors

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