Robertson Davies Quotes

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.

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.

When a man is down on his luck he seems to consume all he can get of coffee and doughnuts.

In the end, it is upon the quality and commitment of individuals that all group movements depend.

The division between art and deviousness and crime is sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper.

Whoever declares a child to be "delicate" thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.

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.

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.

Comparatively few people know what a million dollars actually is. To the majority it is a gaseous concept, swelling or decreasing as the occasion suggests.

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.

Women tell men things that men are not very likely to find out for themselves.

The inert mind is a greater danger than the inert body, for it overlays and stifles the desire to live.

I saw corpses, and grew used to their unimportant look, for a dead man without any of the panoply of death is a desperately insignificant object.

People are not saints just because they haven't got much money or education.

To this day I am indulgent toward orchestras that are trying to lift themselves in the world, while critics are busy assuring them that they are not the Vienna Philharmonic and never will be.

Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.

here are some homosexuals whom we would do well to take seriously.

Let people alone. Let them find their way. Let them find their level and you may sometimes be delighted and astonished at the extraordinary high level to which they'll rise if they're let alone.

After all, we are human beings, and not creatures of infinite possibilities.

There can be no doubt that Samuel Marchbanks is one of the choice and master spirits of this age. If there were such a volume as Who Really Ought To Be Who his entry would require several pages.

Women always think that if they tell a man not to be pompous that will shut him up, but I am an old hand at that game. I know that if a man bides his time his moment will come.

I still have trouble identifying grammatical structures by name, though I know them as matters of usage.

Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures.

Female beauty is an important Minor Sacrament which cannot be received too often; I am not at all sure that neglect of it does not constitute a sin of some kind.

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.

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.

Very few [doctors] are men of science in any very serious sense; they're men of technique.

In India it is regarded as a good idea to dart in front of an oncoming car, for the car is sure to kill the evil spirits who are pursuing you, and all the rest of your life you will have good luck.

One can always tell it's summer when one sees school teachers hanging about the streets idly, looking like cannibals during a shortage of missionaries.

If you attack Stupidity you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of public life.

I don't suppose God laughs at the people who think He doesn't exist. He's above jokes. But the devil isn't. That's one of his most endearing qualities.

Nobody who looks as though he enjoyed life is ever called distinguished, though he is a man in a million.

Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.

Anybody who has had experience of poetesses knows that they may forgive a punch on the jaw, but never a suggestion that they would be wiser to give up versifying.

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.

Canada was settled, in the main, by people with a lower middle-class outlook, and a respect, rather than an affectionate familiarity, for the things of the mind.

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.

Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.

Oh hearts! Nobody gets through life without a broken heart. The important thing is to break the heart so that when it mends it will be stronger than before.

It was as though she was an exile from a world that saw things her way

Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year.

"There is no disputing about tastes," says the old saw. In my experience there is little else.

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.

In too many modern churches there is no emphasis on theology at all. There is a kind of justification by works or by keeping up with modern trends anything that will drag in a few more people.

All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children.

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.

...so Leola thought that a modest romance with a hero in embryo could do no harm - might even be a patriotic duty.

Love affairs are for emotional sprinters the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.

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.

Before she continued her search she sat in his revolving desk chair, and wept for the passing of time, and the necessary death of the well-loved, wise old man.