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… - Robertson Davies

The people who fear humour — and they are many — are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities.

But even Wagner, with his magnificent music and his rather less worthy pseudo-medieval words, is never wholly successful. Why? Because a work of art must be in some measure coherent; but thought and feeling mingled, as all of us experience them, are surging and incoherent. Thought and feeling trimmed into coherence in a work of art are still far from reality, still far from the agonizing confusion that rises like miasma in what a great poet has called the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Are you New World or Old?'
'Sounds like a novel by Henry James.'
'Never read him.'
'Don't. But that was his question and he plumped for the Old.