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After all, we are human beings, and not creatures of infinite possibilities.

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
Creatures
Beings
Possibility
Human
Humans
Possibilities
Infinite

More quotes by Robertson Davies

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Humour very often consists of shrewd perceptions about people. It's usually fun at someone's expense. Nowadays if you're funny at anybody's expense they run to the UN and say, I must have an ombudsman to protect me. You hardly dare have a shrewd perception about anybody.
Robertson Davies
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Several children present me with scraps of paper for autographs: obviously don't know who I am and don't care. I sign Jackie Collins and they go away quite content.
Robertson Davies
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He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.
Robertson Davies
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Very few [doctors] are men of science in any very serious sense they're men of technique.
Robertson Davies
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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
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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
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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.
Robertson Davies
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All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children.
Robertson Davies
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In my experience tact is usually worse than the brutalities of truth.
Robertson Davies
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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
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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
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I think we're living in an age which despises humanity and despises bravery and doesn't need bravery because modern warfare has rather gone beyond bravery. It is a kind of warfare where people are fighting enemies they never see, killing people of whom they know nothing.
Robertson Davies
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Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.
Robertson Davies
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Speakers' nerves affect them in various ways. Some tremble, some become frenzied. I lose all confidence, and suffer from a leaden oppression that makes me wonder why I ever agreed to speak at all the Tomb and the Conqueror Worm seem preferable to delivering the stupid and piffling speech I have so carefully prepared.
Robertson Davies
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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.
Robertson Davies
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They're all so highly educated, you know. Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others.
Robertson Davies
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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.
Robertson Davies
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There is no disputing about tastes, says the old saw. In my experience there is little else.
Robertson Davies
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It is a waste of time to dissipate one's moral zeal in disapproving of royal persons who have mistresses.
Robertson Davies
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She has been kissed as often as a police-court Bible, and by much the same class of people.
Robertson Davies