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Conversation in its true meaning isn't all wagging the tongue sometimes it is a deeply shared silence.

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
Sometimes
Wagging
Shared
Deeply
Tongue
Conversation
Meaning
Silence
True

More quotes by Robertson Davies

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The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.
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Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.
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I think a lot of people have unreasonable expectations because they never stop to consider what life actually has to offer them. They're always looking for some great epiphany from the skies. They never stop to consider the fact which human beings find hardest to recognize: Maybe I'm not worthy of an epiphany.
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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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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.
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The division between art and deviousness and crime is sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper.
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The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
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When one is traveling, one must expect to spend a certain amount of money foolishly.
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Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures.
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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.
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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.
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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
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I just am a Canadian. It is not a thing which you can escape from. It is like having blue eyes
Robertson Davies
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A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
Robertson Davies
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Art is always at peril in universities, where there are so many people, young and old, who love art less than argument, and dote upon a text that provides the nutritious pemmican on which scholars love to chew.
Robertson Davies
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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.
Robertson Davies
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Humour very often consists of shrewd perceptions about people. It's usually fun at someone's expense. Nowadays if you're funny at anybody's expense they run to the UN and say, I must have an ombudsman to protect me. You hardly dare have a shrewd perception about anybody.
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Computers will have to learn that when I quote from some old author who spelled differently from the machine, the wishes of the long-dead author will have to be respected, and the machine will have to mind its manners
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I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is [the doctors'] symbol.
Robertson Davies
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One can always tell it's summer when one sees school teachers hanging about the streets idly, looking like cannibals during a shortage of missionaries.
Robertson Davies