Robertson Davies: Trending quotes

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“I was reading Dorothy Dix this afternoon; she says that it is permissible for a young man to tell a girl he knows fairly well that she has pretty ankles; from this I assume that the better he knows her the higher he may praise her.”

Robertson Davies

The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949)

“The world does so well without me, that I am moved to wish that I could do equally well without the world.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

“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

Letter to Horace Davenport (3 April 1989).

“The day has long passed when a university degree was a guarantee of experience in the humanities, or of literacy beyond its barest meaning of being able, after a fashion, to read and write.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.”

Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies Dangerous Jewels (1960).

“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 book The Cunning Man

Part 2, section 6.
The Cunning Man (1994)

“If you are an intellectual, your best course is to relax and enjoy it.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“There are, one presumes, tone-deaf readers.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“But in their second-best rank, books of this academic sort are, of all books, the easiest to write. They chew over what has already been well chewed; they grapple with other scholars, seeking to bear them down into the academic ooze; they explore the vast caverns of the creator's spirit with no illumination save the smoky and fitful rushlight of their own critical intelligence.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“When the book appeared, a few reviewers found this plot incredible; they accused Professor O'Neal of having too little art to persuade them to suspend their disbelief in his assertion that Shakespeare was a precocious girl. Perhaps this was because they knew that the life of literary people is usually devoid of exciting external incident.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“People are not saints just because they haven't got much money or education.”

Robertson Davies

"Conversations with Gordon Roper".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

“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?”

Robertson Davies

"Haunted by Halloween", in the New York Times (31 October 1990).

“The fall of France must have been a bitter pill to Calvé. She had a poor opinion of Germans, both as people and as artists. It is sad to imagine what her last days may have been in her "robber-baron's castle" as Peggy Wood calls it. But one thing is certain; when death came, Calvé met it with spirit. No one who knew so well how to greet life could possibly fail to know how to greet death.”

Robertson Davies

Emma Calvé (1942).

“But what ailed Little Eva St. Clair, in Uncle Tom's Cabin? What carried off Little Nell?… They have no clear symptoms, and seem to die of Ingrowing Virtue.”

Robertson Davies book The Cunning Man

Part 4, section 20.
The Cunning Man (1994)

“People marry most happily with their own kind. The trouble lies in the fact that people usually marry at an age where they do not really know what their own kind is.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“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

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

“He was born into, and seems never to have questioned, that English "class system" which has been so much abused in the present century. Indeed, several governments have announced their intention of abolishing it, and the most recent prime minister to retire showed her egalitarian principles by accepting the title of Baroness Thatcher.”

Robertson Davies

Lewis Carroll in the Theatre (1994)

“Toronto is already in the toils of Christmas, and from several windows the hollow Ho Ho! of a mechanical Santa Claus may be heard. Children watch these creatures with hard, calculating eyes, wondering if the old man is really crazy, or only pretending to be, like Hamlet…”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

“"Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance." … What excellent advice it is, and how it was beaten into my generation of schoolboys… But one may tire of even the best advice, as one may tire of writing according to these precepts. Would we wish to be without the heraldic splendour and torchlight processions that are the sentences of Sir Thomas Browne? Would we wish to sacrifice the orotund, Latinate pronouncements of Samuel Johnson? Would we wish that Dickens had written in the style recommended by the brothers Fowler, who framed the rules I have quoted; what would then have happened to Seth Pecksniff, Wilkins Micawber, and Sairey Gamp, I ask you?”

Robertson Davies

Writing (1990), he here quotes from The King's English (1906) by Henry Watson Fowler & Francis George Fowler

“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

Somerset Maugham (1982).