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Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year.
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
Lucky
Year
Dies
Years
Love
Isolde
Tristan
Rubbish
Sick
More quotes by Robertson Davies
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
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
We mistrust anything that too strongly challenges our ideal of mediocrity.
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
The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean and pretty. The peony was unchaste, dishevelled as peonies must be, and at the height of its beauty.(...) Every hour is filled with such moments, big with significance for someone.
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
The average politician goes through a sentence like a man exploring a disused mine shaft-blind, groping, timorous and in imminent danger of cracking his shins on a subordinate clause or a nasty bit of subjunctive.
Robertson Davies
To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.
Robertson Davies
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
Robertson Davies
Women say . . . that if men had to have babies there would soon be no babies in the world. . . . I have sometimes wished that some clever man would actually have a baby in some new labor-saving way then all men could take it up, and one of the oldest taunts in the world would be stilled forever.
Robertson Davies
Very few [doctors] are men of science in any very serious sense they're men of technique.
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
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
Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.
Robertson Davies
One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.
Robertson Davies
Be sure to choose what you believe and 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
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.
Robertson Davies
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
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
Canada has one of the highest rates of insanity in any civilized country and one reason might be that life in many places is so desperately dull.
Robertson Davies
