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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
Tristan
Rubbish
Sick
Lucky
Year
Dies
Years
Love
Isolde

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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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I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.
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In my experience tact is usually worse than the brutalities of truth.
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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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Oh hearts! Nobody gets through life without a broken heart. The important thing is to break the heart so that when it mends it will be stronger than before.
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The nature of happiness is such that happiness retreats the more intensely you pursue it.
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Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.
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Love affairs are for emotional sprinters the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.
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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.
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Whoever declares a child to be delicate thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.
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There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.
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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. Goodnight.
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Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality.
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The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
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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.
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And I say to you that if you bring curiosity to your work it will cease to be merely a job and become a door through which you enter the best that life has to give you.
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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?
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Canada was settled, in the main, by people with a lower middle-class outlook, and a respect, rather than an affectionate familiarity, for the things of the mind.
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She has been kissed as often as a police-court Bible, and by much the same class of people.
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Very few [doctors] are men of science in any very serious sense they're men of technique.
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