Quotes from Robertson Davies

Life itself is too great a miracle for us to make so much fuss about potty little reversals of what we pompously assume to be the natural order.

No action is ever lost - nothing we do is without result. It's obvious, of course, but how many people ever really believe it, or act as if it were so?

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.

Subtle wits like to refresh themselves with a whiff of mild indecency.

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.

If you cling frantically to the good, how are you to find out what the good really is?

Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the life of your betters.

Civilization rests on two things, said Hitzig; the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?

Be not another if thou canst be thyself.

but when one human creature dies a whole world of hope and memory and feeling dies with him. To be robbed of the dignity of a natural death is a terrible deprivation.

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.

But I was a lonely creature, and although I would have been very happy to have a friend I just never happened to meet one.

There is really no such thing as a secret; everybody likes to tell, and everybody does tell.

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.

Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me.

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.

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.

The only people who make any sense in the world are those who know that whatever happens to them has its roots in what they are.

I had schooled myself since the war-days never to speak of my enthusiasms; when other people did not share them, which was usual, I was hurt and my pleasure diminished; why was I always excited about things other people did not care about? But I could not hold in.

Marriage isn't just domesticity, or the continuance of the race, or institutionalized sex, or a form of property right. And it damned well isn't happiness, as that word is generally used. I think it's a way of finding your soul.

You're all mad for words. Words are just farts from a lot of fools who have swallowed too many books. Give me things!

Children, don't speak so coarsely,' said Mr. Webster, who had a vague notion that some supervision should be exercised over his daughters' speech, and that a line should be drawn, but never knew quite when to draw it. He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.

You are certainly unique. Everyone is unique. Nobody has ever suffered quite like you before because nobody has ever been you before.

To marry was to take a hand in a dangerous game where the stakes are the highest - a fuller life or a life diminished and confined. It was a game for adult players.