Robertson Davies Quotes

But what I knew then was that nobody — not even my mother — was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface.

Can I be a modern girl, if I acknowledge such thoughts? I must be modern; I live now. But like everybody else, as Hollier says, I live in a muddle of eras, and some of my ideas belong to today, and some to an ancient past, and some to periods of time that seem more relevant to my parents than to me. If I could sort them and control them I might know better where I stand, but when I most want to be contemporary the Past keeps pushing in, and when I long for the Past (like when I wish Tadeusz had not died, and were with me now to guide and explain and help me to find where I belong in life) the Present cannot be pushed away. When I hear girls I know longing to be what they call liberated, and when I hear others rejoicing in what they think of as liberation, I feel a fool, because I simply do not know where I stand.

And here before me stands a marvelously groomed little man who is pinning a hero's medal on me because some of his forebears were Alfred the Great and Charles the First, and even King Arthur, for anything I knew to the contrary. But I shouldn't be surprised if inside he feels as puzzled about the fate that brings him here as I. we are public icons, we two: he an icon of kingship, and I an icon of heroism, unreal yet very necessary; we have obligations above what is merely personal, and to let personal feelings obscure the obligations would be failing in one's duty.

This was clearer still afterward, at lunch at the Savoy....; they all seemed to accept me as a genuine hero, and I did my best to behave decently, neither believing in it too obviously, nor yet protesting that I was just a simple chap who had done his duty when he saw it — a pose that has always disgusted me. Ever since, I have tried to think charitably of people in prominent positions of one kind or another. We cast them in roles, and it is only right to consider them as players, without trying to discredit them with knowledge of their off-stage life — unless they drag it into the middle of the stage themselves.

But when mother died, Caroline was twelve, and in that queer time between childhood and nubile girlhood, when some girls seem to be wise without experience, and perhaps more clear-headed then they will be again until after their menopause.

He became an unimaginative woman's creation. Delilah had shorn his locks and assured him he looked much neater and cooler without them. He gave her his soul, and she transformed it into a cabbage.

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.

You'll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you'll never stop climbing.

There's the satisfaction of Eng-Lang-and-Lit; somebody else has said everything for you, and said it better.

— If Francis has really made up his soul [...], what lies ahead of him? Hasn't he achieved the great end of life? — [...] Having got his soul under his eye, so to speak, Francis must now begin to understand it and be worthy of it [...]. Making up a soul isn't an end; it's the new beginning in the middle of life.

Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill-defined though it was, that a serious study of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical but not a cruel mind, would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man.

...What was wrong between Diana and me was that she was too much a mother to me, and as I had had one mother, and lost her, I was not in a hurry to acquire another — not even a young and beautiful one with whom I could play Oedipus to both our hearts' content. If I could manage it, I had no intention of being anybody's own dear laddie, ever again.

Sometimes fear could be forgotten, but never for long.

Myself: But wasn't the decision a right one? Am I not here? What more could Feeling have achieved than was brought about by Reason?

No need to go into details about what I said to Judy? I am no poet, and I suppose what I said was very much what everybody always says, and although I remember her as speaking golden words, I cannot recall precisely anything she said. If love is to be watched and listened to without embarrassment, it must be transmuted into art, and I don't know how to do that, and it is not what I have come to Zürich to learn.

Education for immediate effective consumption is more popular than ever, and nobody wants to think of the long term, or the intellectual tone of the nation.