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The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.
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
Problem
Disguises
Like
Wretchedness
People
Physician
Diseases
Physicians
Disguise
Disease
Present
More quotes by Robertson Davies
In my experience tact is usually worse than the brutalities of truth.
Robertson Davies
There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
Robertson Davies
I think of the author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, 'I will tell you a story' and then he passes the hat.
Robertson Davies
What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
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
If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.
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
You're all mad for words. Words are just farts from a lot of fools who have swallowed too many books. Give me things!
Robertson Davies
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.
Robertson Davies
Whoever declares a child to be delicate thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.
Robertson Davies
Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong sort of woman.
Robertson Davies
Love affairs are for emotional sprinters the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.
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
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.
Robertson Davies
Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.
Robertson Davies
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
We mistrust anything that too strongly challenges our ideal of mediocrity.
Robertson Davies
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.
Robertson Davies
Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year.
Robertson Davies
No one needs a word processor if he has an efficient secretary.
Robertson Davies
