Robertson Davies: Trending quotes

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“Sometimes for us in Canada it seems as though the United States and the United Kingdom were cup and saucer, and Canada the spoon, for we are in and out of both with the greatest freedom, and we are given most recognition when we are most a nuisance.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“In an age where public health has never been better provided for, and medical men enjoy a respect formerly reserved for the aristocracy and the clergy, millions of people are unwell, or merely feel unwell, or are in dread lest at some future time they may become unwell.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“The search for the sense of humour is as fruitless and as enduring as the hunt for the unicorn; the really wise man knows that the unicorn, being no reality but a life-enhancing myth, must never be hunted, and may only be glimpsed by the well-disposed and the lucky; it cannot be captured, and it is encountered only by indirection.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“I once had a dispute with a group of Swedish professors at the University of Uppsala as to which country, Sweden or Canada, was the dullest in the world. It was a draw; they claimed superiority because of their long history, and I claimed it because of Canada's immense land mass, which gives us space for tremendous expansion, even of such things as dullness.”

Robertson Davies

Opera and Humour (1991)

“The best among our writers are doing their accustomed work of mirroring what is deep in the spirit of our time; if chaos appears in those mirrors, we must have faith that in the future, as always in the past, that chaos will slowly reveal itself as a new aspect of order.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to an idealised past.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“Bookes give no wisdom where none was before,
But where some is, there reading makes it more.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

Sir John Harrington, quoted by Robertson Davies.
A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“The modern writer is too often a Theseus so enamored of the grotesque appearance and strange cavortings of the Minotaur that he has decided to make his permanent abode in the Labyrinth, and to accept the Minotaur's laws as his own.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“His face was tense with pain. But then, who notices when they meet a theatre critic whose face is tense with pain? It is one of the marks of the profession.”

Robertson Davies book Murther and Walking Spirits

Part 1, section 2.
Murther and Walking Spirits (1991)

“As a boy, I remember serials in Chums (an English paper for schoolboys which is now extinct) in which a Terrible Trio — comprising a conjuror boy, a ventriloquist boy, and an India-rubber boy — made life intolerable for everybody who was so unfortunate as to come near them. It kept me in side-shaking fits of laughter and stirred me to ill-fated excesses of emulation, which a lack of talent and even of rubberiness quickly subdued.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“One of the great tests of a band, of course, was its manner of playing "God Save the King." … The English did it with effortless superiority, as though to say "We have frequently played this air in the presence of the King-Emperor and have reason to believe that he was perfectly satisfied." The American band gave an impression that every man was treacherously muttering the words of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" into his instrument; which was, of course, intolerable. I have probably misjudged this band, for like most children I was a patriotic bigot.”

Robertson Davies

I Remember Creatore (1948) Reminiscences on Giuseppe Creatore and his band http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/search.php?queryType=%40attr+1%3D1016+&query=Creatore

“Our age has robbed millions of the simplicity of ignorance, and has so far failed to lift them to the simplicity of wisdom.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.”

Robertson Davies book The Cunning Man

Part 1, section 4.
The Cunning Man (1994)

“That's the nub of the thing, you see — seriousness of spirit. It doesn't mean heaviness of heart, or a lack of fantasy, but it does mean an awareness of influences that touch our lives, sometimes in ways that seem cruel and unfeeling, and sometimes in ways that open up a glory which can never be forgotten.”

Robertson Davies

Scottish Folklore and Opera (1992).

“If people need a book to tell them that in marriage kindness and forbearance are necessary, and that the sexual act is happier when it is undertaken to give pleasure as well as to receive it, these books are what they want. Possibly people so lacking in understanding of themselves and others do not mind being addressed in the coarse, grainy prose of the marriage counselor.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“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 book The Cunning Man

Part 4, section 21.
The Cunning Man (1994)

“The people who fear humour — and they are many — are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities.”

Robertson Davies

Opera and Humour (1991)

“Are you going to be just kind of a walking monument to a job, or are you going to have some kind of really significant inner life of your own? Because the external things — the job, the house, the this, the that — do not really fill the place inside.”

Robertson Davies

"Robertson Davies: Beyond the Visible World".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

“Happiness is a by-product. It is not a primary product of life. It is a thing which you suddenly realize you have because you're so delighted to be doing something which perhaps has nothing whatever to do with happiness.”

Robertson Davies

"Sunday Morning".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)