Robertson Davies > Quotes

“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.”
― Robertson Davies

“Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.”
― Robertson Davies

“I wish people weren't so set on being themselves, when that means being a bastard.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and 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.”
― Robertson Davies

“To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.”
― Robertson Davies

“I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves.”
― Robertson Davies, The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks

“Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.”
― Robertson Davies

“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.”
― Robertson Davies

“We tend to think human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible - that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“Love affairs are for emotional sprinters; the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.”
― Robertson Davies

“She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command.”
― Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost

“But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. all men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character.… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?”
― Robertson Davies, The Manticore

“This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries.”
― Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy

“One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.”
― Robertson Davies

“Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.”
― Robertson Davies

“Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.”
― Robertson Davies, World of Wonders

“It was as though she was an exile from a world that saw things her way”
― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

“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

“Conversation in its true meaning isn't all wagging the tongue; sometimes it is a deeply shared silence. ”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“Computers will have to learn that when I quote from some old author who spelled differently from the machine, the wishes of the long-dead author will have to be respected, and the machine will have to mind its manners”
― Robertson Davies

“Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.”
― Robertson Davies

“The gift that isn't big enough to make a mark, but is too big to leave the possessor in peace. And so they can't be content to be Sunday painters, or poets who write for a few friends, or composers whose handful of delicate little settings of Emily Dickinson can't find a singer. It's a special sort of hell.”
― Robertson Davies

“We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and he fear and dread and splendor and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state, beacuse it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshiped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory and pitiless.”
― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

“For I was, as you have already guessed, a collaborator with Destiny, not one who put a pistol to its head and demanded particular treasures. The only thing for me to do was to keep on keeping on, to have faith in my whim, and remember that for me, as for the saints, illumination when it came would probably come from some unexpected source.”
― Robertson Davies

“I am quite a wise old bird, but I am no desert hermit who can only prophesy when his guts are knotted with hunger. I am deep in the old man’s puzzle, trying to link the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the spirit until the two are one.”
― Robertson Davies

“The women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something nearer to whole men. Just as we complete them, of course; it’s not a one-way thing. Leola and I, when romance was stripped away, were too much alike; our strengths and weaknesses were too nearly the same. Together we would have doubled our gains and our losses, but that isn’t what love is.”
― Robertson Davies

“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, World of Wonders

“My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.”
― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

“I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.”
― Robertson Davies

“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

“Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.”
― Robertson Davies, High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories

“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, The Deptford Trilogy

“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

“If I had my way books would not be written in English but in an exceedingly difficult secret language.... This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors...who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.”
― Robertson Davies

“To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall (which will teach him not to fall again) when a word from you would keep him on his feet but ignorant of an important danger, is one of the tasks of the teacher that calls for special energy, because holding in is more demanding than crying out. ”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“I had become wiser, I tried to find out what irony really is, and discovered that some ancient writer on poetry had spoken of “Ironia, which we call the drye mock.” And I cannot think of a better term for it: The drye mock. Not sarcasm, which is like vinegar, or cynicism, which is so often the voice of disappointed idealism, but a delicate casting of cool and illuminating light on life, and thus an enlargement. The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit’s desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement.”
― Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man

“she swore in good mouth-filling oaths, but never smutty ones, and that was uncommon. She knew the prosody of profanity. . . . she knew the tune, as well as the words. She was not a raving beauty, but she had fine eyes and a Pre-Raphelite air of being too good for this world while at the same time exhibiting much of what this world desires in a woman, and I suppose I gaped at her and behaved clownishly.”
― Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man

“Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvelous is indeed an aspect of the real?”
― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

“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, A Voice from the Attic: Essays on the Art of Reading

“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, The Manticore

“Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.”
― Robertson Davies

“Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.”
― Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost

“Nothing is more dangerous to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.”
― Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost

“Just about all men need a woman in one way or another, unless they’re very strange indeed. Tormenting you refreshes him. And you shouldn’t underestimate the gratitude all men feel for women’s beauty. Men who truly don’t like flowers are very uncommon and men who don’t respond to a beautiful woman are even more uncommon. It’s not primarily sexual; it’s a lifting of the spirits beauty gives. He’ll be in to torment you, and tease you, and enrage you, but really to have a good, refreshing look at you.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“A world without corruption would be a strange world indeed - and a damned bad world for lawyers, let me say.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“You are like a fire: you warm me.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“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, The Rebel Angels

“Be not another if thou canst be thyself.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory--humorous, poignant, humane allegory--disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge.”
― Robertson Davies, A Mixture of Frailties