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Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.

Robertson Davies

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Robertson Davies
Age: 82 †
Born: 1913
Born: August 28
Died: 1995
Died: December 3
Journalist
Literary Critic
Musicologist
Novelist
Playwright
Professor
Reporter
Writer
William Robertson Davies
World
Patriotism
Boredom
Stupidity
Especially
Greatest
Evil
Three
Combined
Live
Evils

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It is odd how all men develop the notion, as they grow older, that their mothers were wonderful cooks. I have yet to meet a man who will admit that his mother was a kitchen assassin and nearly poisoned him.
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In the end, it is upon the quality and commitment of individuals that all group movements depend.
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The Alexander Technique keeps the body alive, at ages when many people have resigned themselves to irreversible decline.
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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.
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Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.
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Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.
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Canada, having few indigenous prejudices, has been compelled to import them from elsewhere, duty-free, and it is the rare Canadian who is not shaken, at some time in the year, by old, unhappy, far-off things / And battles long ago, like Wordsworth's solitary reaper. We are a nation of immigrants, and not happy in our minds.
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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.
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Childhood may have periods of great happiness, but it also has times that must simply be endured. Childhood at its best is a form of slavery tempered by affection.
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We live in a world where bulk is equated with quality.
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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.
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Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.
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I don't suppose God laughs at the people who think He doesn't exist. He's above jokes. But the devil isn't. That's one of his most endearing qualities.
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What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
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If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.
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A great many complimentary things have been said about the faculty of memory, and if you look in a good quotation book you will find them neatly arranged.
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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.
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here are some homosexuals whom we would do well to take seriously.
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There can be no doubt that Samuel Marchbanks is one of the choice and master spirits of this age. If there were such a volume as Who Really Ought To Be Who his entry would require several pages.
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Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.
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