Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
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Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows.
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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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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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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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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
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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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Art is man determined to die sane.
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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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The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
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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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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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History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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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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The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
BERNARD DEVOTO