Bernard DeVoto Quotes
When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn. The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.
DeVoto, Bernard. The Hour. Houghton Mifflin, 1951, p. 11.
Bernard Augustine DeVoto (1897–1955), American historian, essayist, columnist, teacher, editor, and reviewer, was a lifelong champion of American Public lands and the conservation of public resources as well as an outspoken defender of civil liberties. He was the author of a series of Pulitzer-Prize-winning popular histories of the American West and for many years wrote The Easy Chair, an influential column in Harper's Magazine. DeVoto also wrote several well-regarded novels and during the 1950s served as a speech-writer for Adlai Stevenson. His friend and biographer, Wallace Stegner described Devoto as "flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, ... often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull."
