Robertson Davies Quotes
Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.
There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
I cannot imagine any boy of spirit who would not be delighted to play a drunkard even to vomiting in front of his Sunday school. Indeed, the vomiting might be the chief attraction of the role.
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
Conversation in its true meaning isn't all wagging the tongue; sometimes it is a deeply shared silence.
On the whole, we treat the Devil shamefully, and the worse we treat Him the more He laughs at us.
This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Goodnight.
Love affairs are for emotional sprinters; the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.
He types his labored column - weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn.
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
When irony first makes itself known in a young man's life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle.
Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time.
There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.
The great charm of cats is their rampant egotism, their devil-may-care attitude toward responsibility, their disinclination to earn an honest dollar.
There are times when I think that the reading I have done in the past has had no effect except to cloud my mind and make me indecisive
The Alexander Technique keeps the body alive, at ages when many people have resigned themselves to irreversible decline.
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.
May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence? Write it down: write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery.
To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.
Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.
I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.
The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.
If you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
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.
The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.
Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground - not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.
If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.
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.