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 DEVOTOWhen evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the cocktail hour.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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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 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 achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
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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 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.
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Art is man determined to die sane.
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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 Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
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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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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 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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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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Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
BERNARD DEVOTO