Devoto Quotes

#1. In an age when all that was old seems new again, Bernard DeVoto's The Hour couldn't have made a more timely reappearance. This book reminds me of one of the joys of being an adult-cocktail hour!

Graydon Carter

#2. If in the well and truly made martini DeVoto finds "water of life" and the blessing to the spirit, so also DeVoto's The Hour brings to its readers the breath of life and a vision of themselves made generous, indomitable and wise.

Lewis H. Lapham

#3. To think that we might easily have gone through life not knowing each other, missing all this free flow of love and ideas and warmth and sharing ... We share really almost everything. (Avis DeVoto to Julia Child)

Joan Reardon

#4. I like every part of growing older except what happens to your feet.
Written by Avis DeVoto to Julia Child in As Always, Julia

Joan Reardon

#5. You have come nearer to mastering a good many aspects of cooking than anyone except a handful of great chefs, and some day it will pay off. I know it will. You will just have to go on working, and teaching, and getting around, and spreading the gospel until it does. (Avis DeVoto to Julia Child)

Joan Reardon

#6. It is horrible how people will use anything as a political monkey wrench and to hell with the country. (Julia Child to Avis DeVoto)

Joan Reardon

#7. 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

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

Bernard DeVoto

#9. Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which the worst by far 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

#10. The water of life was given to us 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

#11. 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.

Bernard DeVoto

#12. 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.

Bernard DeVoto

#13. 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

#14. The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.

Bernard DeVoto

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

Bernard DeVoto

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

Bernard DeVoto

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

Bernard DeVoto

#18. 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

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

Bernard DeVoto

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

Bernard DeVoto

#21. 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.

Bernard DeVoto

#22. History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.

Bernard DeVoto

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

Bernard DeVoto

#24. Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.

Bernard DeVoto

#25. 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.

Bernard DeVoto

#26. Art is man determined to die sane.

Bernard DeVoto

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

Bernard DeVoto

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

Bernard DeVoto

#29. 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 DeVoto

#30. Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.

Bernard DeVoto