The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart, the day was not bad, the season has not been bad, there is sense and even promise in going on.
BERNARD DEVOTOOne may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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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 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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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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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 trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
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The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
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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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The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
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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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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
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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 dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
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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.
BERNARD DEVOTO