Quotes from Bernard DeVoto

Art is man determined to die sane.

History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.

The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

year away. Finally this was the country of the Plains Indians, horse Indians, nomads, buffalo hunters, the most skillful, the most relentless, and the most savage on the continent....Mountain craft was a technological adaptation

et le bon temps viendra.

A light winter means a hard summer.

DeVoto himself had clearly concluded, go with your gut and do what you know is right: do whatever you can to make the world a better place for those who come after you.

sheets and wagon covers.

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

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

Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.