Moderation, the Golden Mean, the Aristonmetron, is the secret of wisdom and of happiness. But it does not mean embracing an unadventurous mediocrity:… - Robertson Davies

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.

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.

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.