Bernard DeVoto

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.”
• “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.”
• “Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.”
• “Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.”
• “Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.”
• “Biography seemed to be no more than a high-spirited game of yanking out shirttails and setting fire to them.”

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