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. The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross… — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
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 DeVoto Copy Share Image
Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which the worst by far is rum. Nevertheless, we have… — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid… — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he… — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its… — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire. — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it. — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
The water of life was given to us to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more… — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth… — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification.… — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is,… — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act. — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. — Bernard DeVoto Copy Share Image
