The Cornish Trilogy Quotes

“What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of us ever have the courage to face: and that is the child you once were, long before formal education ever got its claws into you - that impatient, all-demanding child who wants love and power and can't get enough of either and who goes on raging and weeping in your spirit till at last your eyes are closed and all the fools say, 'Doesn't he look peaceful?' It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old.”
― Robertson Davies, The Cornish Trilogy: The Rebel Angels / What's Bred in the Bone / The Lyre of Orpheus

“Poor woman, I suppose she led a dog’s life, and it made her disagreeable, which she mistook for being strong.”
― Robertson Davies, The Cornish Trilogy: The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone, The Lyre of Orpheus

“Nobody told me he was an American." "Not American—Canadian." "Well, what's the difference?" "They're touchier, that's what.”
― Robertson Davies, Cornish Trilogy Omnibus

“New Money wore dinner suits, which it called tuxedos, and smoked big cigars from which it removed the band before lighting up—an unthinkable solecism, for”
― Robertson Davies, Cornish Trilogy Omnibus

“What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.”
― Robertson Davies, Cornish Trilogy Omnibus