Bernard DeVoto

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

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

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

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