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 DEVOTOThe 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.
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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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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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 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 parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
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The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
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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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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 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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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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You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
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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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Art is man determined to die sane.
BERNARD DEVOTO