Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
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 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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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 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 dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
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Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
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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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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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History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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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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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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Art is man determined to die sane.
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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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The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
BERNARD DEVOTO