Top 100 Davies Robertson Quotes
#1. There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'
Amy Bloom
#2. The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books.
Robertson Davies
#4. Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.
Robertson Davies
#5. Merlin seeks assistance from Pigwiggen, the only one of Arthur's knights who is also a fairy, and they unite their enchantments to move the British Court to Turkestan. Lively end to Act One.
Davies Robertson
#6. The young are often accused of exaggerating their troubles; they do so, very often, in the hope of making some impression upon the inertia and the immovability of the selfish old.
Robertson Davies
#7. I think we should see whether we are wise trying to educate everybody to a high standard the way we are trying to do now. There has to be a high level of education so everybody is literate, but whether university education is necessary for everyone is open to question.
Robertson Davies
#8. Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless one is a farmer with a professional concern for the weather.
Robertson Davies
#9. Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars.
Robertson Davies
#11. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man.
Robertson Davies
#12. He became an unimaginative woman's creation. Delilah had shorn his locks and assured him he looked much neater and cooler without them. He gave her his soul, and she transformed it into a cabbage.
Robertson Davies
#13. The inert mind is a greater danger than the inert body, for it overlays and stifles the desire to live.
Robertson Davies
#14. It used to be fashionable for authors to have their pictures taken with dogs, but the dogs always looked like models hired from an advertising agency, and probably were.
Robertson Davies
#15. Canada has one of the highest rates of insanity in any civilized country and one reason might be that life in many places is so desperately dull.
Robertson Davies
#16. Female beauty in an important Minor Sacrament which cannot be received too often; I am no sure at all that the neglect of it does not constitute a sin of some kind.
Robertson Davies
#17. It seemed to me as if the stones sang, in the strangest voices, in the language of Ultima Thule.
Robertson Davies
#18. The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.
Robertson Davies
#19. He types his labored column - weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn.
Robertson Davies
#20. The beauty of ethics is that nobody can be perfectly certain about what it includes or even what it means.
Robertson Davies
#21. What chance has a Saint Francis, if his Assisi is a multicultured, financial, unyieldingly secular northern city, whose lepers and other detrimentals are charges on the public purse?
Robertson Davies
#22. Celtic civilization was tribal, but by no means savage or uncultivated. People who regarded the theft of a harp from a bard as a crime second only to an attack on the tribal chieftain cannot be regarded as wanting in cultivated feeling.
Robertson Davies
#23. Some countries you love. Some countries you hate. Canada is a country you worry about.
Robertson Davies
#24. Sexual thrills are not all physical, and although Parlabane was an unlikely seducer, even on the intellectual plane, it was clear that his desire was, by this prolonged tickling, to bring me to an orgasm of the mind.
Robertson Davies
#25. The egotist is all surface; underneath is a pulpy mess and a lot of self-doubt. But the egoist may be yielding and even deferential in things he doesn't consider important; in anything that touches his core he is remorseless.
Robertson Davies
#26. You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.
Robertson Davies
#27. All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children ...
Robertson Davies
#28. What an amusing drama life is when one is not obliged to be one of the characters!
Robertson Davies
#29. In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries.
Robertson Davies
#30. It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.
Robertson Davies
#31. Which was complimentary but unhelpful, because the librarians were tough.
Robertson Davies
#32. I had schooled myself since the war-days never to speak of my enthusiasms; when other people did not share them, which was usual, I was hurt and my pleasure diminished; why was I always excited about things other people did not care about? But I could not hold in.
Robertson Davies
#34. Myself: But wasn't the decision a right one? Am I not here? What more could Feeling have achieved than was brought about by Reason?
Robertson Davies
#35. How much more complicated life is than the attainment of a Ph.D. would lead one to believe!
Robertson Davies
#36. Childhood may have periods of great happiness, but it also has times that must simply be endured. Childhood at its best is a form of slavery tempered by affection.
Robertson Davies
#37. Curiosity is part of the cement that holds society together.
Robertson Davies
#38. I have no skills with machines. I fear them, and because I cannot help attributing human qualities to them, I suspect that they hate me and will kill me if they can.
Robertson Davies
#40. Civilization rests on two things," said Hitzig; "the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?
Robertson Davies
#41. The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
Robertson Davies
#42. The irrational will have its say, perhaps because 'irrational' is the wrong word for it.
Robertson Davies
#43. No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.
Robertson Davies
#44. Although there may be nothing new under the sun, what is old is new to us and so rich and astonishing that we never tire of it. If we do tire of it, if we lose our curiosity, we have lost something of infinite value, because to a high degree it is curiosity that gives meaning and savour to life.
Robertson Davies
#45. The clerisy are those who seek, and find, delight and enlargement of life in books. The clerisy are those for whom reading is a personal art.
Robertson Davies
#46. And why should it not be terrifying? A little terror, in my view, is good for the soul, when it is terror in the face of a noble object.
Robertson Davies
#47. You would not serve junk food at a banquet, and your book must be a banquet. Get your language from Swift , not from Shopsy's.
Robertson Davies
#48. The recognition of oneself as a part of nature, and reliance on natural things, are disappearing for hundreds of millions of people who do not know that anything is being lost.
Robertson Davies
#49. Elsie, who had a lot of energy and no shame ... she seduced me. It was not a success, from Elsie's point of view, because the orgasm for women was just coming into general popularity then, and she didn't have one.
Robertson Davies
#50. I don't think Emily was quite up to the demands of being everything to Chips. Love lays heavy burdens on the loved one, sometimes
Robertson Davies
#51. There's the satisfaction of Eng-Lang-and-Lit; somebody else has said everything for you, and said it better.
Robertson Davies
#52. The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.
Robertson Davies
#53. To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.
Robertson Davies
#54. Though thousands of people indulge themselves in it regularly, and even develop a taste for it, there is no doubt in my mind (and that of scientists whom I employ to prove it) that Work is a dangerous and destructive drug, and should be called by its right name, which is Fatigue.
Robertson Davies
#55. But I can endure a surprising amount of midnight torment without being absent from class sharp at nine the next day. I suppose that marks me as something not quite up to the Byronic standard.
Robertson Davies
#56. When one is traveling, one must expect to spend a certain amount of money foolishly.
Robertson Davies
#58. Marriage is a framework to preserve friendship. It is valuable because it gives much more room to develop than just living together. It provides a base from which a person can work at understanding himself and another person.
Robertson Davies
#59. I just am a Canadian. It is not a thing which you can escape from. It is like having blue eyes
Robertson Davies
#60. If a man wants to be of the greatest possible value to his fellow-creature s let him begin the long, solitary task of perfecting himself.
Robertson Davies
#61. Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions.
Robertson Davies
#62. The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so ... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity.
Robertson Davies
#63. Like it or not, to reach middle age with less money or less prestige than our father had is somewhat to lose face. Stupid of course, when put like that, but who is prepared to argue that we are not stupid in several important ways?
Robertson Davies
#64. Geordie wrote a letter to Mr. Webster in which the shrieking figure of Apology was hounded through a labyrinth of agonized syntax.
Robertson Davies
#66. He [Jesus] had a terrible temper, you know, undoubtedly inherited from His Father.
Robertson Davies
#67. Forgive yourself for being a human creature, Ramezay. That is the beginning of wisdom; that is part of what is meant by the fear of God; and for you it is the only way to save your sanity. Begin now, or you will end up with your saint in the madhouse.
Robertson Davies
#68. What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.
Robertson Davies
#69. The body is the inescapable factor, you see. You can keep in good shape for what you are, but radical change is impossible. Health isn't making everybody into a Greek ideal; it's living out the destiny of the body.
Robertson Davies
#70. You'll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you'll never stop climbing.
Robertson Davies
#71. She has been kissed as often as a police-court Bible, and by much the same class of people.
Robertson Davies
#72. No one needs a word processor if he has an efficient secretary.
Robertson Davies
#73. I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is [the doctors'] symbol.
Robertson Davies
#74. The people who fear humor - and they are many - are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities.
Robertson Davies
#75. There is more to marriage than four bare legs under a blanket.
Robertson Davies
#76. I still have trouble identifying grammatical structures by name, though I know them as matters of usage.
Robertson Davies
#77. A great many complimentary things have been said about the faculty of memory, and if you look in a good quotation book you will find them neatly arranged.
Robertson Davies
#78. Several children present me with scraps of paper for autographs: obviously don't know who I am and don't care. I sign "Jackie Collins" and they go away quite content.
Robertson Davies
#79. My dear fellow, my whole life is moved by the principle that the one thing which is more important than peace is music. It is because I believe that I am poor.
Robertson Davies
#80. When I hear girls I know longing to be what they call liberated, and when I hear others rejoicing in what they think of as liberation, I feel a fool, because I simply do not know where I stand. (Maria Magdalena Theotoky)
Robertson Davies
#82. Conversation in its true meaning isn't all wagging the tongue; sometimes it is a deeply shared silence.
Robertson Davies
#83. And I say to you that if you bring curiosity to your work it will cease to be merely a job and become a door through which you enter the best that life has to give you.
Robertson Davies
#84. To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.
Robertson Davies
#85. Moderation, the Golden Mean, the Aristonmetron, is the secret of wisdom and of happiness. But it does not mean embracing an unadventurous mediocrity; rather it is an elaborate balancing act, a feat of intellectual skill demanding constant vigilance. Its aim is a reconciliation of opposites.
Robertson Davies
#86. But what I knew then was that nobody-not even my mother-was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself in the surface.
Robertson Davies
#87. Any theologian understands martyrdom, but only the martyr experiences the fire.
Robertson Davies
#88. You're all mad for words. Words are just farts from a lot of fools who have swallowed too many books. Give me things!
Robertson Davies
#89. The nature of happiness is such that happiness retreats the more intensely you pursue it.
Robertson Davies
#90. The Bible takes much of its color from whoever is reading it, and it provides a text to support almost every shade of opinion, however preposterous.
Robertson Davies
#91. Never harbor grudges; they sour your stomach and do no harm to anyone else.
Robertson Davies
#92. All art is holy. Not that it is all long-faced and miserable; it can be wild and wooly. But if it transforms you, it is art. And it is holy.
Robertson Davies
#93. Whether you are really right or not doesn't matter; it's the belief that counts.
Robertson Davies
#94. You can't persuade most of the public that education and making a living aren't the same thing.
Robertson Davies
#95. Are you going to be just kind of a walking monument to a job, or are you going to have some kind of really significant inner life of your own? Because the external things the job, the house, the this, the that do not really fill the place inside.
Robertson Davies
#96. The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.
Robertson Davies
#98. Nobody who looks as though he enjoyed life is ever called distinguished, though he is a man in a million.
Robertson Davies
#99. What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
Robertson Davies
#100. If I know this, I ought to be able to escape the stupider kinds of illusion. The absolute nature of things is independent of my senses (which are all I have to perceive with), and what I perceive is an image of my own psyche.
Robertson Davies
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