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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.

Bernard DeVoto

It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America.
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Civilization Condition Country Finish Permanent
The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
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Doe Math Mind
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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Earth Happiest Kissing Life Sudden
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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Altogether Campground Coma Pulse Strengthening Weaken
One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification.
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Impact Inheritance May
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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Civilization Destiny Life
Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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Done Onions People
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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Evidence Generosity Life Men
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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Believe Shadow Watches
History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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Art History Philosophy
The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
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Reason Refuse Trouble
The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
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Empires Internal People United States
The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
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Citizen Country Park Permamnetly Preserve
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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Government Race Stupid
You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
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Kissing Martini Refrigerator
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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Mad May Novelists

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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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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