26 Quotes by Bernard DeVoto

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 citizens.

The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains.

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

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.

The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart, the day was not bad, the season has not been bad, there is sense and even promise in going on.

Art is man determined to die sane.

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

History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.

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.