History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
BERNARD DEVOTOA 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.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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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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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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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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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 only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
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The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
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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 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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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
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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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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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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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Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
BERNARD DEVOTO