Quotes from Robertson Davies

You'll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you'll never stop climbing.

Are you going to be just kind of a walking monument to a job, or are you going to have some kind of really significant inner life of your own? Because the external things — the job, the house, the this, the that — do not really fill the place inside.

How they chirped over their cups.

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 on the surface.

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.

What was wrong between Diana and me was that she was too much a mother to me, and as I had had one mother, and lost her, I was not in a hurry to acquire another--not even a young and beautiful one with whom I could play Oedipus to both our hearts' content. If I could manage it, I had no intention of being anybody's own dear laddie, ever again.

The wit of a graduate student is like champagne. Canadian champagne.

You and I have precisely the same amount of time as the Old Masters— twenty-four hours in every day. There is no more, and never any less.

His reply had that clarity, objectivity and reasonableness which is possible only to advisers who have completely missed the point.

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.

Heroj modernog doba, to je ?ovek koji iz unutrašnje borbe izlazi kao pobednik.

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.

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?

She's too much like him in temperament. Married couples should complement each other, and not merely double their losses. There's much to be said for the square peg in the round hole, as the Cubist told the Vorticist.

banking is like religion: you have to accept certain rather dicey things simply on faith, and then everything else follows in marvellous logic.

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.

He blew his nose resoundingly. B natural, said he, my cold drops more than a full tone every hour. Obviously I am dying.

I saw no reason why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.

The paradox of money is that when you have lots of it you can manage life quite cheaply. Nothing so economical as being rich.

I think our love was all the better for being stretched out by our necessity to study hard to keep up with our work. To have all the time in the world to devote to love may be idyllic for a summer, but linked sweetness long drawn out is the greater luxury. [...] During these summer absences, I longed for her, and wrote to her, and loved her more than ever, abstinence sharpening the appetite.

I don't think Emily was quite up to the demands of being everything to Chips. Love lays heavy burdens on the loved one, sometimes

understanding is not the point. Feeling is the point. Understanding and experiencing are not interchangeable. Any theologian understands martyrdom, but only the martyr experiences the fire.

Nobody told me he was an American. Not American—Canadian. Well, what's the difference? They're touchier, that's what.

I cannot remember a time when I did not take it as understood that everybody has at least two, if not twenty-two sides to him.