Quotes from Robertson Davies

It is doubtful if, at any time in her life, anyone had sung directly at Miss Pottinger, and she was flustered in a region of her being from which she had had no messages for many years.

Secondrateness comes out of his pores like a fog.

What would you do if you were me? said Solly. What would I do in your place? No, no; you'd do something fantastic and get farther into the soup. I want to know what you would do if you were intelligent but prudent. What would you do if you were me?

If I tarted up in a nice suit and a clean collar, I could spend hours and hours every week jawing to Rotary Clubs about what fine music is and how I am just as good as they are. I'm not as good as they are, praise be God! I am a honest citizen, I am not fit to black their boots.

He came of a generation to which any girl, before she is married, is a kind of unexploded bomb.

They were untouched by modern education, but their government was striving with might and main to procure this inestimable benefit for them; anticlericalism and American bustle would soon free them from belief in miracles and holy likenesses.

and his goose would be cooked; probably suicide would be his only way out.

As her life was empty, it had filled up with a variety of more or less disagreeable symptoms that convinced her that she was seriously and fascinatingly unwell.

Who is she? That is what you must discover, Ramezay, and you must find your answer in psychological truth, not in objective truth. You will not find out quickly, I am sure. And while you are searching, get on with your own life and accept the possibility that it may be purchased at the price of hers and that this may be God's plan for you and her.

There he lay, in a pale frothing liquid which she had, for a dreadful moment, believed to be some eccentric vital fluid of his own, but which issued from a case of broken bottles which lay near him.

I think I'd rather get a job. Why? Why not? Jobs are for people who need them. You don't need one. You'd be taking it from somebody else who did.

The borborygmy, or rumbling of the stomach, has not received the attention from either art or science which it deserves. It is as characteristic of each individual as the tone of the voice. It can be vehement, plaintive, ejaculatory, conversational, humorous -- its variety is boundless. But there are few who are prepared to give it an understanding ear; it is dismissed too often with embarrassment or low wit.

They needed me, Mackilwraith; they needed me. And if there is one thing which utterly destroys a boy's character, it is to be needed. Boys are unendurable unless they are wholly expendable.

one elderly teacher, who had seen generations of neophytes pass through these early tests, was known to have sobbed a little, in professional ecstasy of joy, when describing Hector's lesson on the Lowest Common Denominator.

There is a touch of the fascist in most adolescents; they admire the strong man who stands no nonsense; they have no objection to seeing the weak trampled underfoot; mercy in its more subtle forms is outside their understanding and has no meaning for them.

It is not hard to be popular with any group, whether composed of the most conventional Canadians or of Central European freaks, if one is prepared to talk to people about themselves.

Oh, yes, there was a witch; there are always witches where there are children.

We come to God in little steps, not in a leap.

I am like a man who has built his house on the lip of a volcano. Until the volcano claims me I live, in a sense, heriocally.

I think a great many marriages would be saved if people would behave toward one another with the same courtesy that they would extend to someone whom they really didn't know as well as a marriage necessarily implies. … It's not very easy to do, but it is surely easier to do than to haggle and nag and fight and bitch and yelp at one another as you hear a lot of married people doing … They seem to feel that the familiarity of affection permits anything, including insult.

I have known far too many university graduates, in this country and in my own, who, as soon as they have received the diploma which declares them to be of Certified Intelligence, put their brains in cold storage and never use them again until they are hauled away to the mortuary.

What school performance of anything is ever less than a triumph?

Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures.

We wanted to meet him, for though we were neither of us naive people we had not wholly lost our belief that it is delightful to meet artists who have given us pleasure.