Robertson Davies Quotes

Nobody ever reads the same book twice. ~ Robertson Davies

People are not saints just because they haven't got much money or education. ~ Robertson Davies

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater. ~ 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

In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries. ~ Robertson Davies

Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions. ~ Robertson Davies

All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children ... ~ Robertson Davies

... 'But Gold was not all. The other kings bring Frank Innocence and Mirth.' | Darcourt was startled, then delighted. 'That is very fine, Yerko; is it your own?' | 'No, it is in the story. I saw it in New York. The kings say, We bring you Gold, Frank Innocence, and Mirth.' | 'Sancta simplicitas,' said Darcourt, raising his eyes to mine. 'If only there were more Mirth in the message He has left to us. We miss it sadly, in the world we have made. And Frank Innocence. Oh, Yerko, you dear man.' ... ~ Robertson Davies

An infant is a seed. Is it an oak seed or a cabbage seed? Who knows. All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages. ~ Robertson Davies

The art of the quoter is to know when to stop. ~ Robertson Davies

His failure hurt too badly for that. It was a bad equation. Best erase it and try a new one.
If adults could put aside their obsessions with such firmness, the world would undoubtedly be a better place. Robertson Davies does not say that in his Deptford Trilogy ... but he strongly hints at it. ~ Stephen King

We live in a world where bulk is equated with quality. ~ Robertson Davies

"You see, I do a little in this way myself," he explained; "here is my most prized piece." He took from his pocket a snuffbox, which looked to be of eighteenth-century workmanship. Inside the lid was an enamel picture of Leda and the Swan, and when a knob was pushed to and fro the swan thrust itself between Leda's legs, which jerked in mechanical ecstasy. A nasty toy, I thought, but Urky doted on it. "We single gentlemen like to have these things," he said. "What do you do, Darcourt? Of course we know that Hollier has his beautiful Maria."
To my astonishment Hollier blushed, but said nothing. His beautiful Maria? My Miss Theotoky, of New Testament Greek? I didn't like it at all. ~ Robertson Davies

I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call pornography in it, because I feel that pornography is a cheat. It is an attempt to provide sexual experience by secondhand means. Now sex is a thing which has to be experienced firsthand, if you are really going to understand it, and pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. It's not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit
a twenty-second best. ~ Robertson Davies

It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose. ~ Robertson Davies

The dog is a yes-animal. Very popular with people who can't afford a yes man. ~ Robertson Davies

Myself: But wasn't the decision a right one? Am I not here? What more could Feeling have achieved than was brought about by Reason? ~ Robertson Davies

Not enough attention is paid to the negative side of fashion. Great effort is exerted to make people look smart, but somebody should face the fact that a lot of people never will be smart, and that they should be given some assistance in maintaining their fascinating dowdiness. ~ Robertson Davies

Now I want you to remember something because I don't think we shall meet again very soon. It is this; however fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, think and live fashionably; virtue and honour will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed, self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honour will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so. In short, Davey, God is not dead. And I can assure you God is not mocked. ~ Robertson Davies

The Conservative party found him an embarrassment because he was apt to criticize the party leader in public, the Liberals naturally wanted to defeat him, and the newspapers were out to get him. It was a dreadful campaign on his part, for he lost his head, bullied his electors when he should have wooed them, and got into a wrangle with a large newspaper, which he threatened to sue for libel. He was defeated on election day so decisively that it was obviously a personal rather than a political rejection. ~ Robertson Davies

That's the nub of the thing, you see seriousness of spirit. It doesn't mean heaviness of heart, or a lack of fantasy, but it does mean an awareness of influences that touch our lives, sometimes in ways that seem cruel and unfeeling, and sometimes in ways that open up a glory which can never be forgotten. ~ Robertson Davies

So Leola thought that a modest romance with a hero in embryo could do no harm - might even be a patriotic duty. ~ Robertson Davies

No, it's the musicians and I must say they are an accomplished bunch, but odd, as musicians tend to be. Is it the vibration from their instruments, do you suppose, working on the brain? All that fraught buzzing? ~ Robertson Davies

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 ~ Robertson Davies

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. ~ Robertson Davies

The women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something nearer to whole men. Just as we complete them, of course; it's not a one-way thing. Leola and I, when romance was stripped away, were too much alike; our strengths and weaknesses were too nearly the same. Together we would have doubled our gains and our losses, but that isn't what love is. ~ Robertson Davies

We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and he fear and dread and splendor and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state, beacuse it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshiped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory and pitiless. ~ Robertson Davies

I still have trouble identifying grammatical structures by name, though I know them as matters of usage. ~ Robertson Davies

If you attack Stupidity you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of public life. ~ Robertson Davies

I thought I was in love with Leola, by which I meant that if I could have found her in a quiet corner, and if I had been certain that no one would ever find out, and if I could have summoned up the courage at the right moment, I would have kissed her. But, looking back on it now, I know that I was in love with Mrs Dempster. Not as some boys are in love with grown-up women, adoring them from afar and enjoying a fantasy life in which the older woman figures in an idealized form, but in a painful and immediate fashion; I saw her every day, I did menial tasks in her house, and I was charged to watch her and keep her from doing foolish things. Furthermore, I felt myself tied to her by the certainty that I was responsible for her straying wits, the disorder of her marriage, and the frail body of the child who was her great delight in life. I had made her what she was, and in such circumstances I must hate her or love her. In a mode that was far too demanding for my age or experience, I loved her. ~ Robertson Davies

The house stank; a stench all its own pervaded every corner. It was a threnody in the key of Cat minor, with a ground-bass of Old Dog, and modulations of old people, waning lives, and relinquished hopes. ~ Robertson Davies

You are like a fire: you warm me. ~ Robertson Davies

We have no quarrel with the Freudians, but we do not put the same stress on sexual matters as they do. Sex is very important, but if it were the single most important thing in life, it would all be much simpler, and I doubt if mankind would have worked so hard to live far beyond the age when sex is the greatest joy. ~ Robertson Davies

To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason. ~ Robertson Davies

Forgive yourself for being a human creature, Ramezay. That is the beginning of wisdom; that is part of what is meant by the fear of God; and for you it is the only way to save your sanity. Begin now, or you will end up with your saint in the madhouse. ~ Robertson Davies

Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless one is a farmer with a professional concern for the weather. ~ Robertson Davies

In India it is regarded as a good idea to dart in front of an oncoming car, for the car is sure to kill the evil spirits who are pursuing you, and all the rest of your life you will have good luck. ~ Robertson Davies

A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart. ~ Robertson Davies

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. ~ Robertson Davies

Let people alone. Let them find their way. Let them find their level and you may sometimes be delighted and astonished at the extraordinary high level to which they'll rise if they're let alone. ~ Robertson Davies

Sometimes there was a serious article on a hot topic, and I especially remember one by a bishop headed "Is Nudity Salacious?" The bishop thought it need not be, if encountered in the proper spirit, but he gave a lot of enlightening examples of conditions under which it might be, in his word, "inflammatory." There wasn't much nudity in our neck of the woods, and I enjoyed that article tremendously. ~ Robertson Davies

A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. ~ Robertson Davies

My position was a common one; I wanted to do the right thing but could not help regretting the damnable expense. ~ Robertson Davies

Mr. Robertson Davies has also suggested in his Deptford Trilogy that the same great truism which applies to writing, painting, picking horses at the track, and telling lies in a sincerely believable way, also applies to magic: some people got the knack, and some people don't. Hilly didn't. ~ Stephen King

We tend to think human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible - that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways. ~ Robertson Davies

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? ~ Robertson Davies

I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me. ~ Robertson Davies

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. ~ Robertson Davies

On the whole, we treat the Devil shamefully, and the worse we treat Him the more He laughs at us. ~ Robertson Davies

Here are some homosexuals whom we would do well to take seriously. ~ Robertson Davies

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

I have no skills with machines. I fear them, and because I cannot help attributing human qualities to them, I suspect that they hate me and will kill me if they can. ~ Robertson Davies

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

Wisdom may be rented ... on the experience of other people, but we buy it at an inordinate price before we make it our own forever. ~ Robertson Davies

Elsie, who had a lot of energy and no shame ... she seduced me. It was not a success, from Elsie's point of view, because the orgasm for women was just coming into general popularity then, and she didn't have one. ~ Robertson Davies

Of course I long for her, but in honesty I must say that I would rather long for her than have her continuously present. Travel agents assure us that 'getting there is half the fun'; I might say with at least equal truth that longing is some of the best of loving. ~ Robertson Davies

He types his labored column - weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn. ~ Robertson Davies

Though thousands of people indulge themselves in it regularly, and even develop a taste for it, there is no doubt in my mind (and that of scientists whom I employ to prove it) that Work is a dangerous and destructive drug, and should be called by its right name, which is Fatigue. ~ Robertson Davies

Very often when I am introduced to women, I think, What is she really like behind the disguise which she wears? And very often I discover that she is pleasant enough, and probably would expand and glow if she received enough affection. ~ Robertson Davies

What had Pledger-Brown said? Too bad, Davey; he wanted blood and all we could offer was guts. ~ Robertson Davies

The people who fear humor - 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

We mistrust anything that too strongly challenges our ideal of mediocrity. ~ Robertson Davies

We all create an outward self with which to face the world, and some people come to believe that is what they truly are. So they people the world with doctors who are nothing outside of the consulting-room, and judges who are nothing when they are not in court, and business men who wither with boredom when they have to retire from business, and teachers who are forever teaching. That is why they are such poor specimens when they are caught without their masks on. They have lived chiefly through the Persona. ~ Robertson Davies

Can I be a modern girl, if I acknowledge such thoughts? I must be modern; I live now. But like everybody else, as Hollier says, I live in a muddle of eras, and some of my ideas belong to today, and some to an ancient past, and some to periods of time that seem more relevant to my parents than to me. If I could sort them and control them I might know better where I stand, but when I most want to be contemporary the Past keeps pushing in, and when I long for the Past (like when I wish Tadeusz had not died, and were with me now to guide and explain and help me to find where I belong in life) the Present cannot be pushed away. When I hear girls I know longing to be what they call liberated, and when I hear others rejoicing in what they think of as liberation, I feel a fool, because I simply do not know where I stand. ~ Robertson Davies

The result of a single action may spread like the circles that expand when a stone is thrown into a pond, until they touch places and people unguessed at by the person who threw the stone ... ~ Robertson Davies

Although I am almost illiterate mathematically, I grasped very early in life that any one who can count to ten can count upward indefinitely if he is fool enough to do so. ~ Robertson Davies

There comes a time when one must be strong with rationalists, for they can reduce anything whatever to dust, if they happen not to like the look of it, or if it threatens their deep-buried negativism. I mean of course rationalists like you, who take some little provincial world of their own as the whole of the universe and the seat of all knowledge. ~ Robertson Davies

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? ~ Robertson Davies

Who's Mrs. Gummidge?'
'If you're a good girl and get well soon I'll lend you the book.'
'Oh, somebody in a book! All you people like Nilla and the Cornishes and that man Darcourt seem to live out of books. As if everything was in books!'
'Well, Schnak, just about everything is in books. No, that's wrong. We recognize in books what we've met in life. But if you'd read a few books you wouldn't have to meet everything as if it had never happened before, and take every blow right on the chin. You'd see a few things coming ... ~ Robertson Davies

He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities. ~ Robertson Davies

"There is no disputing about tastes," says the old saw. In my experience there is little else. ~ Robertson Davies

The nature of happiness is such that happiness retreats the more intensely you pursue it. ~ Robertson Davies

Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don't choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very credible one, will choose you. ~ Robertson Davies

I liked the company of most of my colleagues, who were about equally divided among good men who were good teachers, awful men who were awful teachers, and the grotesques and misfits who drift into teaching and are so often the most educative influences a boy meets in school. If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher. ~ Robertson Davies

I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind ... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves. ~ Robertson Davies

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. ~ Robertson Davies

- If Francis has really made up his soul [...], what lies ahead of him? Hasn't he achieved the great end of life?
- [...] Having got his soul under his eye, so to speak, Francis must now begin to understand it and be worthy of it [...]. Making up a soul isn't an end; it's the new beginning in the middle of life. ~ Robertson Davies

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

One of the things that puzzles me is that so few people want to look at life as a totality and to recognize that death is no more extraordinary than birth. When they say it's the end of everything they don't seem to recognize that we came from somewhere and it would be very, very strange indeed to suppose that we're not going somewhere. ~ Robertson Davies

Love affairs are for emotional sprinters; the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners. ~ Robertson Davies

Whether you are really right or not doesn't matter; it's the belief that counts. ~ Robertson Davies

It is a waste of time to dissipate one's moral zeal in disapproving of royal persons who have mistresses. ~ Robertson Davies

Faustina is a great work of the Creator. She has nothing of what you call brains; she doesn't need them for her destiny ... It is to be glorious for a few years: not to outlive some dull husband and live on his money till she is eighty, going to lectures and comparing the attractions of winter tours that offer the romance of the Caribbean. ~ Robertson Davies

Curiosity is part of the cement that holds society together. ~ Robertson Davies

When irony first makes itself known in a young man's life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle. ~ Robertson Davies

Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is?
I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths!
Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born. ~ Robertson Davies

If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher. This is where the private schools score over state-run schools; they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations. ~ Robertson Davies

I'll kill you all," yelled Bill, and swore for three or four minutes, calling us every dirty name he could think of for being so chicken-hearted. When people talk about "leadership quality" I often think of Bill Unsworth; he had it. And like many people who have it, he could make you do things you didn't want to do by a kind of cunning urgency. We were ashamed before him. Here he was, a bold adventurer, who had put himself out to include us
lily-livered wretches
in a daring, dangerous, highly illegal exploit, and all we could do was worry about being hurt! We plucked up our spirits and swore and shouted filthy words, and set to work to wreck the house. ~ Robertson Davies

This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries. ~ Robertson Davies

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. ~ Robertson Davies

...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. ~ Robertson Davies

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. ~ Robertson Davies

When it came time for me to go to bed, my mother beckoned me to her, and kissed me, and whispered, "I know I'll never have another anxious moment with my own dear laddie." I pondered these words before I went to sleep. How could I reconcile this motherliness with the screeching fury who had pursued me around the kitchen with a whip, flogging me until she was gorged with - what? Vengeance? What was it? Once, when I was in my thirties and reading Freud for the first time, I thought I knew. I am not so sure I know now. 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. ~ Robertson Davies

All eras of history are an equal distance from eternity. ~ Robertson Davies

There was a moment, however, when the King and I were looking directly into each other's eyes, and in that instant I had a revelation that takes much longer to explain than to experience. Here am I, I reflected, being decorated as a hero, and in the eyes of everybody here I am indeed a hero; but I know that my heroic act was rather a dirty job I did when I was dreadfully frightened; I could just as easily have muddled it and been ingloriously killed. But it doesn't much matter, because people seem to need heroes; so long as I don't lose sight of the truth, it might as well be me as anyone else. And here before me stands a marvellously groomed little man who is pinning a hero's medal on me because some of his forebears were Alfred the Great, and Charles the First, and even King Arthur, for anything I know to the contrary. But I shouldn't be surprised if inside he feels as puzzled about the fate that brings him here as I. ~ Robertson Davies

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. ~ Robertson Davies

They [say] everybody's creative. Well, everybody is. But any real creativity has to rest on a basis of an acquired technique and an acquired knowledge; you can't be creative in a void, or you just get a mess. ~ Robertson Davies

Inactivity and deprivation of all accustomed stimulus is not rest; it is a preparation for the tomb ~ Robertson Davies

Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity. ~ Robertson Davies

Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart. ~ Robertson Davies