Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Doe
Drunk
Young
Handle
Firsts
Mets
First
Powerful
Thing
Getting
Men
Known
Life
Experience
Like
Makes
Irony

More quotes by Robertson Davies

Image
The Wild Hunt is known in all Celtic countries it is a huntsman with a pack of hounds who is seen or heard to rush through the country. Those who see him are doomed to die. The writer heard the Wild Hunt quite distinctly one night in Wales several years ago, but has not suffered any ill effects from it as yet.
Robertson Davies
Image
No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.
Robertson Davies
Image
Celtic civilization was tribal, but by no means savage or uncultivated. People who regarded the theft of a harp from a bard as a crime second only to an attack on the tribal chieftain cannot be regarded as wanting in cultivated feeling.
Robertson Davies
Image
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.
Robertson Davies
Image
Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.
Robertson Davies
Image
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
Image
My dear fellow, my whole life is moved by the principle that the one thing which is more important than peace is music. It is because I believe that I am poor.
Robertson Davies
Image
Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.
Robertson Davies
Image
The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
Robertson Davies
Image
No one needs a word processor if he has an efficient secretary.
Robertson Davies
Image
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
Image
Love affairs are for emotional sprinters the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.
Robertson Davies
Image
To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.
Robertson Davies
Image
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.
Robertson Davies
Image
May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence? Write it down: write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery.
Robertson Davies
Image
Whoever declares a child to be delicate thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.
Robertson Davies
Image
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.
Robertson Davies
Image
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.
Robertson Davies
Image
Though thousands of people indulge themselves in it regularly, and even develop a taste for it, there is no doubt in my mind (and that of scientists whom I employ to prove it) that Work is a dangerous and destructive drug, and should be called by its right name, which is Fatigue.
Robertson Davies
Image
In too many modern churches there is no emphasis on theology at all. There is a kind of justification by works or by keeping up with modern trends anything that will drag in a few more people.
Robertson Davies