Quotes from Bernard De Voto

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.

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

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

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.

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 psychological organization...A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.

The martini is the supreme American gift to world culture.

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

New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan, while the American empire careens onward toward its predicted 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.