Murther and Walking Spirits Quotes

“...one's family is made up of supporting players in one's personal drama. One never supposes that they starred in some possibly gaudy and certainly deeply felt show of their own.”
― Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits

“The beauty of ethics is that nobody can be perfectly certain about what it includes or even what it means.”
― Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits

“Snobbery, like every other social attitude, takes its character from those who practise it. The snob is supposedly a mean creature, delighting in slight and trivial distinctions. But is the man who bathes every day a snob because he does not seek the company of the one-bath-a-week, one-shirt-a-week, one-pair-of-clean-drawers-a-week, one-pair-of-socks-a-week man?”
― Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits

“People who have failed at Christianity aren't likely to make great Buddhists.”
― Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits

“It is woefully hard to find good, or even merely literate, writers, and they laugh at me when I say that sloppy, go-as-you-please writing carries less authority than decent prose. You must remember our public, they say. And indeed that is what I do, and I think the public is fully able to deal with the best they can produce. Patronizing the public, and assuming that it hangs, breathless, upon what it reads in the papers, is almost the worst of journalistic sins.”
― Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits

“But even Wagner, with his magnificent music and his rather less worthy pseudo-medieval words, is never wholly successful. Why? Because a work of art must be in some measure coherent; but thought and feeling mingled, as all of us experience them, are surging and incoherent. Thought and feeling trimmed into coherence in a work of art are still far from reality, still far from the agonizing confusion that rises like miasma in what a great poet has called the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
― Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits

“There's the satisfaction of Eng-Lang-and-Lit; somebody else has said everything for you, and said it better.”
― Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits

“Are you New World or Old?'
'Sounds like a novel by Henry James.'
'Never read him.'
'Don't. But that was his question and he plumped for the Old.”
― Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits

“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, Murther and Walking Spirits

“Ah, critics! How unforgiving they are toward anything that isn't, in some special way, known only to them, absolutely first-rate. Do they ever guess, I wonder, how much energy and guts and sheer talent it takes to be second-rate?”
― Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits

“Anna, who has always been devout, knows well that Despair is a mortal sin, and now she knows that it is a luxury, as well.”
― Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits