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 DEVOTOThe trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
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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 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.
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The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
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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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History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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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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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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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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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
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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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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 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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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