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Bernard DeVoto

34 quotes

“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. ... 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.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: New England, There She Stands", in Harper's, vol. 164 (March, 1932), p. 415
“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 (1897–1955) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The West: A Plundered Province", in Harper's, vol. 169 (August, 1934), p. 356
“Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mark Twain: The Ink of History", Address at the University of Missouri (December, 1935). Reported in Bartlett's, 15th ed. (Little, Brown and Co., 1980), p. 837
“Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mark Twain in Eruption (New York: Harper & Bros., 1940), introduction (p. xxvii)
“Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mark Twain at Work (Harvard UP, 1942), p. 109
“Biography seemed to be no more than a high-spirited game of yanking out shirttails and setting fire to them.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Describing the imitations of Lytton Strachey's scandalous Eminent Victorians in the '20s and '30s. Reported in TIME, vol. 114, no. 1 (July 2, 1979), p. 83
“The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1092 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What To Tell the Young", in Harper's, vol. 182, no. 1092 (May, 1941), p. 671
“The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the walls withdraw, the weight is lifted, the specters fade. Nerve-ends that stuck through your skin like bristles when you blotted the last line on your manuscript or closed the office door behind you have withdrawn into their sheaths, your pulse slows, your heart lifts. The day was not so bad as it seemed, the season has not been so bad, maybe there is sense or even promise in going on.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our friend alcohol was given us of the gods 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.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Our Friend Alcohol", in Harper's (c. 1948). Collected, and revised, in The Hour (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1951), ch. 5 (pp. 83, 84):
“When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. The fragile tie of ecstasy is broken in a few minutes, and thereafter there can be no remarriage.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing can be done with people who put olives in martinis, presumably because in some desolate childhood hour someone refused them a dill pickle and so they go through life lusting for the taste of brine.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections 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 DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1195 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: For the Wayward and Beguiled", in Harper's, vol. 199, no. 1195 (December, 1949), pp. 68–71. Collected in The Hour (1951), ch. 2 (pp. 28, 39)
“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.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1206 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: But Sometimes They Vote Right Too", in Harper's, vol. 201, no. 1206 (November, 1950), p. 67. Collected in The Easy Chair (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1955), pt. 4, sec. 3 (p. 198)
“That other supreme American gift to world culture, the martini cocktail, will do only at its own hour — when darkness begins to fall from the wings of night and the heart cries out for a swift healing.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1211 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Whiskey Is for Patriots", in Harper's, vol. 202, no. 1211 (April, 1951), p. 71. Collected in The Hour (1951), ch. 1 (p. 22)
“We are a pious people but a proud one too, aware of a noble lineage and a great inheritance. Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which by far the worst is rum. Nevertheless, we have improved man's lot and enriched his civilization with rye, bourbon and the Martini cocktail. In all history has any other nation done so much?”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The American Spirits", The Hour (1951), ch. 1 (p. 1)
“Don't have much to do with people who drink sherry at any time except with soup; there's something wrong with them.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Enemy", The Hour (1951), ch. 3 (p. 54)
“Orange bitters make a good astringent for the face. Never put them in anything that is to be drunk.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Enemy", The Hour (1951), ch. 3 (p. 55)
“Remember always that the three abominations are: (1) rum, (2) any other sweet drink, and (3) any mixed drink except one made of gin and dry vermouth in the ratio I have given.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Enemy", The Hour (1951), ch. 3 (p. 61)
“In the South, a lady’s opinions could not be more important than a drawing-room charade, an accompaniment to sillabubs and cobbler.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1835 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 1: 1835. The New Jerusalem (p. 10)
“The migration was under way. ... Its great days were just around the turn of spring — and an April restlessness, a stirring in the blood, a wind from beyond the oak openings, spoke of the prairies, the great desert, and the western sea.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1835 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 1: 1835. The New Jerusalem (p. 11)
“The common man fled westward. A thirsty land swallowed him insatiably. There is no comprehending the frenzy of the American folk-migration. God’s gadfly had stung us mad.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“California was almost entirely dream, a dream vague but deep in the minds of a westering people.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mr. Lincoln was telling his countrymen that the achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire, and he was telling them that Yesterday must not be permitted to Balkanize it.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Between the amateur and the professional, ... there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different integration, a different nervous and muscular and psychological organization. ... A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The missionaries were vortices of force thrown out in advance by the force to the eastward that was making west. They thought that they came to bring Christ but in thinking so they were deceived. They were agents of a historical energy and what they brought was the United States. The Indians had no chance. If it looked like religion it was nevertheless Manifest Destiny.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1838 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 13: Away, You Rolling River. 1838 (p. 371)
“History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one can say fully what sublimity means, or how the awe or terror or exaltation inspired by the earth in torment affects him; but everyone, even the shallowest sightseer, the strident and aggressive woman in purple rayon slacks shouldering others aside to look at the Great White Throne, is enlarged by the experience. The sightseer may lack vocabulary, even concept, to speak of the one in the many, eternity moving through forms of change, the flowing away at once of time and earth, but there remain mystery and the fulfillment of identity, and he will be richer than he was. It is the same with aesthetics: one may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification. The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizen.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The National Parks", in Fortune, vol. 35, no. 6 (June, 1947), p. 121
“Hetæræ accompany the fine arts in association with quick money. They came to Virginia as soon as the true value of the Comstock was perceived. They constituted, no doubt, a deplorable source of gambling, pleasure and embroilment. They were not soft-spoken women, their desire was not visibly separable from the main chance, and they would have beheld Mr. Harte’s portrayal of them at Poker Flat with ribald mirth. But let them have a moment of respect. They civilized the Comstock. They drove through its streets reclining in laquered broughams, displaying to male eyes fashions as close to Paris as any then current in New York. They were, in brick houses hung with tapestries, a glamour and a romance, after the superheated caverns of the mines. They enforced a code of behavior: one might be a hard-rock man outside their curtains but in their presence one was punctilious or one was hustled away. They brought Parisian cooking to the sagebrush of Sun Mountain and they taught the West to distinguish between tarantula juice and the bouquet of wines. An elegy for their passing. The West has neglected to mention them in bronze and its genealogies avoid comment on their marriages, conspicuous or obscure, but it owes them a here acknowledged debt for civilization.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The route led through the enchanted chaos of the Arizona deserts, a country mostly of naked rock in mesas, peaks, and gashed canyons, painted tremendous colors with brushes of comet’s hair. Frequently it was a giant-cactus country — saguaro by designers of modern decoration, cholla by medieval torturers — or a country of yuccas and the yucca’s weirdest form, the Joshua tree. Sometimes it was even a grass country. And through most of the route it was a country where occasionally you could find the characteristic oasis of the Southwest, a little, hidden arroyo with something of a stream in it, choked with cottonwoods, green plants blooming only a rifle shot from desolation.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one will ever tell in full the heroism or the stupidity of the foreign missions, the holiness-saturated devotion of the missionaries or their invincible foolishness. There were only two agencies for the extension of civilization on a large scale, armies and missions, and in the light of history the primitives who drew the armies were much the better off. The missionary was a man glad to submerge self in a holy cause but, except in a minority so small it does not count, his dedication locked him away from reality so completely that at this distance he seems crazed if not crazy. The heathen were not people to him: they were souls.”
Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) first seen 1834 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 8: To Men Benighted. 1834 (p. 201)