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I feel that what is wrong with scores of modern novels which show literary quality, but which are repellent and depressing to the spirit is not that … - Robertson Davies
" "I feel that what is wrong with scores of modern novels which show literary quality, but which are repellent and depressing to the spirit is not that the writers have rejected a morality, but that they have one which is unexamined, trivial, and lopsided. They have a base concept of life; they bring immense gusto to their portrayals of what is perverse, shabby, and sordid, but they have no clear notion of what is Evil; the idea of Good is unattractive to them, and when they have to deal with it, they do so in terms of the sentimental or the merely pathetic. Briefly, some of them write very well, but they write from base minds that have been unimproved by thought or instruction. They feel, but they do not think. And the readers to whom they appeal are the products of our modern universal literacy, whose feeling is confused and muddled by just such reading, and who have been deluded that their mental processes are indeed a kind of thought.
English
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About Robertson Davies
Robertson Davies CC (August 28 1913 – December 2 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist and professor.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
William Robertson Davies
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"He fetched a large and unpleasant-looking rag from under his pillow and blew his nose loud and long. "E flat," said he, when he had finished. "Funny, I never seem to blow twice on the same note. You’d think that the nose, under equal pressure, and all that, would behave predictably, but it doesn’t. See this?" He held out the rag. "Piece of an old bedsheet; never blow your nose on paper, Bridgetower. Save old bedsheets for when you have a cold. They’re the only comfort in a really bad cold, and the only way of reckoning its virulence. I consider this to be a two-sheet cold.
A few years ago I had to answer some searching questions to a Customs official about a book which I had with me, printed in Latin, and which the official suspected to be Russian; it was a jestbook, as a matter of fact, and I was so foolish as to say so, forgetting that a Latin joke is as strange to the modern imagination as a unicorn or an amphisbaena.
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