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.
BERNARD DEVOTOArt is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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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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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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The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
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History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
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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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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
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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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The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
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Art is man determined to die sane.
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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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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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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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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 only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
BERNARD DEVOTO








