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Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground - not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.

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
Free
Art
Carpet
Good
Probability
Flying
Carry
Ground
Horse
Imagination

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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.
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I cannot imagine any boy of spirit who would not be delighted to play a drunkard even to vomiting in front of his Sunday school. Indeed, the vomiting might be the chief attraction of the role.
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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.
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After all, we are human beings, and not creatures of infinite possibilities.
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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
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Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.
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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 eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
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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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Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures.
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If you don't hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you'll get.
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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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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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A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.
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Like it or not, to reach middle age with less money or less prestige than our father had is somewhat to lose face. Stupid of course, when put like that, but who is prepared to argue that we are not stupid in several important ways?
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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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No one needs a word processor if he has an efficient secretary.
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What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
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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.
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These matters require what I think of as the Shakespearean cast of thought. That is to say, a fine credulity about everything, kept in check by a lively skepticism about everything.... It keeps you constantly alert to every possibility.
Robertson Davies