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 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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The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
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Art is man determined to die sane.
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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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It 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.
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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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History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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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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Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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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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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 trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
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The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
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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.
BERNARD DEVOTO