Robertson Davies Quotes

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When I was born good fairies clustered round my cradle, showering me with wit, beauty, grace, freedom from dandruff, natural piety and other great gifts, but the Wicked Fairy Carabosse (who had not been invited to the party) crept to my side and screamed "Let him be cursed with Inability To Do Little Jobs Around The House", and so it has always been.

Robertson Davies
My brother Fairchild has just bought himself an "electronic janitor", a costly device which, I understand, keeps his house at an even temperature of 70 degrees without any effort on his part whatsoever. I don't know quite how it works, but it has something to do with molecules and the quantum theory.

Robertson Davies
I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead.

Robertson Davies
A life given to determining the best form for the letters of the alphabet — does it seem extraordinary to you? But no day passes that our eyes do not fall upon something that was influenced, and made better, by this extraordinary, eccentric Scot, and if that is not a life well spent, I should be interested in a better definition.

Robertson Davies
In spite of all this chaos, however, most people seem to lead humdrum lives, and badly want livening up. Do you think we should organize a Chaos-of-the-Month Club, guaranteeing to supply all members with something really unnerving every thirty days?

Robertson Davies
The egotist is all surface; underneath is a pulpy mess and a lot of self-doubt. But the egoist may be yielding and even deferential in things he doesn't consider important; in anything that touches his core he is remorseless.

Robertson Davies
Of course, fairies are all imported in North America. We have no native fairies. The Little People do not long survive importation — unless they go to California and grow large and beautiful, but haven't much flavour, like the fruit and the film stars.

Robertson Davies
There are great numbers of people to whom the act of reading a book — any sort of book — is wondrous; they speak of the reader in the tone of warm approbation which they use otherwise when referring to pregnant women, or the newly dead.

Robertson Davies
The people who fear humour — and they are many — are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities.

Robertson Davies
If our age is not distinguished for a greatly increased number of happy marriages and a more intelligent approach to the problems of sex, we may surely assert that some forms of misery in the sexual realm are less widespread than they used to be; and of the many people who are unhappy, thousands have some idea of what lies at the root of their unhappiness, and thus far they are better off than their forefathers, who had none, or attributed their distress to sin.

Robertson Davies
It seemed to me as if the stones sang, in the strangest voices, in the language of Ultima Thule.

Robertson Davies
It seems to me that most of us get all the adventure we are capable of digesting. Personally, I have never had to fight a dozen pirates single-handed, and I have never jumped from a moving express-train onto the back of a horse, and I have never been discovered in the harem of the Grand Turk. I am glad of all these things. They are too rich for my digestion, and I do not long for them. I have all the close shaves and narrow squeaks in my life that my constitution will stand, and my daily struggles with bureaucrats, taxgatherers and uplifters are more exhausting than any encounters with mere buccaneers on the Spanish Main.

Robertson Davies
The reader cannot create; that has been done for him by the author. The reader can only interpret, giving the author a fair chance to make his impression.

Robertson Davies
We all have slumbering realms of sensibility which can be coaxed into wakefulness by books.

Robertson Davies
"Can you tell me the time of the last complete show?"
"You have the wrong number."
"Eh? Isn't this the Odeon?"
I decide to give a Burtonian answer.
"No, this is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night."

Robertson Davies
It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.

Robertson Davies
Sometimes for us in Canada it seems as though the United States and the United Kingdom were cup and saucer, and Canada the spoon, for we are in and out of both with the greatest freedom, and we are given most recognition when we are most a nuisance.

Robertson Davies
Any enjoyment or profit we get from life, we get Now; to kill Now is to abridge our own lives.

Robertson Davies
Great drama, drama that may reach the alchemical level, must have dimension and its relevance will take care of itself. Writing about AIDS rather than the cocktail set, or possibly the fairy kingdom, will not guarantee importance.... The old comment that all periods of time are at an equal distance from eternity says much, and pondering on it will lead to alchemical theatre while relevance becomes old hat.

Robertson Davies
The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit's desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement.

Robertson Davies
The critic must be reconciled to his necessary, ambiguous role, and however much he may caper, joke, and posture for us in his writings, we are unlikely to forget that he is a man who may, at any moment, tread heavily upon our dreams — unworthy dreams, foolish dreams, stupid dreams, sometimes — but still dreams.

Robertson Davies
Never harbor grudges; they sour your stomach and do no harm to anyone else.

Robertson Davies
The day has long passed when a university degree was a guarantee of experience in the humanities, or of literacy beyond its barest meaning of being able, after a fashion, to read and write.

Robertson Davies
The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.

Robertson Davies
Only in the theatre was it possible to see the performers and to be warmed by their personal charm, to respond to their efforts and to feel their response to the applause and appreciative laughter of the audience. It had an intimate quality; audience and actors conspired to make a little oasis of happiness and mirth within the walls of the theatre. Try as we will, we cannot be intimate with a shadow on a screen, nor a voice from a box.

Robertson Davies
To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.

Robertson Davies
It was from him I learned that the stage is too coarse a medium for the works of the supreme poet; Shakespeare's depths can only be plumbed in the solitude of the study. So I used to shut myself up and plumb away for hours, and I acquired such aptitude that for a time there was a belief that I might pipe Shakespeare into young minds of the rest of my days, as a full-fledged academic plumber.

Robertson Davies
Bookes give no wisdom where none was before,
But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Robertson Davies
The whole world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young, act young, and everlastingly harp on the fact they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution which would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curses of the world.

Robertson Davies
If I tended toward frivolity as a boy, I am incorrigibly settled in it now.

Robertson Davies