Bernard DeVoto Quotes

The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.

You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.

History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.

When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour.

The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.

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.

The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.

Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.

The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.

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.

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.

The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.

Art is man determined to die sane.

Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.

California was almost entirely a dream, a dream vague but deep in the minds of a westering people.