Quotes from Robertson Davies

I have been very miserable since - miserable not for an hour but for months on end - but I can still feel that hour's misery in its perfect desolation, if I am fool enough to call it up in my mind.

She had an ability, invaluable in a weak person, to persuade herself that whatever was inevitable had her full approval, and was in some measure her own doing.

Hector was sent to his office to wait, while Rat-face was restored to such limited consciousness as his heredity and his fate permitted him to enjoy.

Success? It has the shortest half-life of any known substance.

I am constantly astonished by the people, otherwise intelligent, who think that anything so complex and delicate as a marriage can be left to take care of itself. One sees them fussing about all sorts of lesser concerns, apparently unaware that side by side with them — often in the same bed — a human creature is perishing from lack of affection, of emotional malnutrition.

Unhappiness of the kind that is recognized and examined and brooded over is a spiritual luxury.

The gods destroy the heroes with a sudden blow, but they grind us mediocrities for weary, weary years.

Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart.

What chance has a Saint Francis, if his Assisi is a multicultured, financial, unyieldingly secular northern city, whose lepers and other detrimentals are charges on the public purse?

All eras of history are an equal distance from eternity.

If Heloise had been more clear-headed she'd have seen that Abelard was a frightful nerd in human relationships.

We come to God in little steps, not a leap, and that love of police-court truth you think so much of comes very late on the way, if it comes at all. What is truth? as Pilate asked; I've never pretended that I could have told him. I'm just glad when a boozer sobers up, or a man stops beating his woman, or a crooked lad tries to go straight. If it makes him boast a bit, that's not the worst harm it can do. You unbelieving people apply cruel, hard standards to us who believe.

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

I was a talking lover, which most women hate.

She was a romantic, and as I had never met a female romantic before it was a delight to me to explore her emotions. She wanted to know all about me, and I told her as honestly as I could; but as I was barely twenty, and a romantic myself, I know now that I lied in every word I uttered—lied not in fact but in emphasis, in colour, and in intention.

Wit and high spirits and a sense of fun- yes, they're wonderful things. But a sense of humour- a real one- is a rarity and can be utter hell. Because it's immoral, you know, in the real sense of the word: I mean, it makes its own laws; and it possesses the person who has it like a demon. Fools talk about it as though it were the same thing as a sense of balance, but believe me, it's not. It's a sense of anarchy, and a sense of chaos. Thank God it's rare.

What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.

What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us. I know that sounds horrible and cruel, considering what happens to a lot of people, and it can't be the whole explanation. But it's a considerable part of it.

I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.

Who ever talks about a lifelong, intimate friendship expressing itself in the broadest possible range of conversation? If people are really alive and alert it ought to go on and on, prolonging life because there is always something more to be said.

However much science and educational theory and advanced thinking you pump into a college or a university, it always retains a strong hint of its medieval origins.

You remember the little poem by Ibsen that I quoted to you during one of our early meetings? MYSELF: Only vaguely. Something about self-judgement. DR. VON HALLER: No, no; self-judgement comes later. Now pay attention, please: To live is to battle with trolls in the vaults of heart and brain. To write: that is to sit in judgement over one's self.

I suppose you really like them dirty, said Miss Vyner. That's it. Dirty and full of divine mystery, said Cobbler, rolling his eyes and kissing his fingers. "Sheer connoisseurship, I confess, but I've always preferred a bit of ripened cheese to a scientifically packaged breakfast food.

It was plain that he had had a lot of training, for nobody ever sang so by the light of Nature.