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Robertson Davies Quotes

Robertson Davies quotes about life

Canadian Novelist, Writer August 28, 1913 – December 2, 1995

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Quotes

What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of us ever have the courage to face: and that is the child you once were, long before formal education ever got its claws into you - that impatient, all-demanding child who wants love and power and can't get enough of either and who goes on raging and weeping in your spirit till at last your eyes are closed and all the fools say, 'Doesn't he look peaceful?' It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all... Robertson Davies
Robertson Davies quote: "A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life."
A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life. Robertson Davies
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness. Robertson Davies
Who's Mrs. Gummidge?' 'If you're a good girl and get well soon I'll lend you the book.' 'Oh, somebody in a book! All you people like Nilla and the Cornishes and that man Darcourt seem to live out of books. As if everything was in books!' 'Well, Schnak, just about everything is in books. No, that's wrong. We recognize in books what we've met in life. But if you'd read a few books you wouldn't have to meet everything as if it had never happened before, and take every blow right on the chin.... Robertson Davies
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 life of your betters. Robertson Davies
But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory--humorous, poignant, humane allegory--disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge. Robertson Davies
We have no quarrel with the Freudians, but we do not put the same stress on sexual matters as they do. Sex is very important, but if it were the single most important thing in life, it would all be much simpler, and I doubt if mankind would have worked so hard to live far beyond the age when sex is the greatest joy. Robertson Davies
Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in that spirit, he can find much to confirm him in his belief, particularly if he has never examined any short period of the past in day-to-day detail. Robertson Davies
Life itself is too great a miracle for us to make so much fuss about potty little reversals of what we pompously assume to be the natural order. Robertson Davies
This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries. Robertson Davies
If you are determined on the religious life, you have to toughen up your mind. You have to let it be a thouroughfare for all thoughts, and among them you must make choices. Robertson Davies
This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Goodnight. Robertson Davies
Once it was the fashion to represent villages as places inhabited by laughable, livable simpletons, unspotted by the worldliness of city life, though occasionally shrewd in rural concerns. Later it was the popular thing to show villages as rotten with vice, and especially such sexual vice...incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, and masochism were supposed to rage behind lace curtains and in the haylofts, while a rigid piety was professed in the streets. Robertson Davies
To marry was to take a hand in a dangerous game where the stakes are the highest - a fuller life or a life diminished and confined. It was a game for adult players. Robertson Davies
Robertson Davies quote: "You'll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so..."
You'll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you'll never stop climbing. Robertson Davies

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