Robertson Davies Quotes

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

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He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.

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I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.

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Real bibliophiles do not put their books on shelves for people to look at or handle. They have no desire to show off their darlings, or to amaze people with their possessions. They keep their prized books hidden away in a secret spot to which they resort stealthily, like a Caliph visiting his harem, or a church elder sneaking into a bar. To be a book collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope-fiend with those of a miser.

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Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night.

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The young are often accused of exaggerating their troubles they do so, very often, in the hope of making some impression upon the inertia and the immovability of the selfish old.

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Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong sort of woman. The right sort of woman can distinguish between Creative Lassitude and plain shiftlessness.

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There are times when I think that the reading that I have done in the past has had no effect except to cloud my mind and make me indecisive.

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The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion what is left is theater.

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We wanted to meet him, for though we were neither of us naive people we had not wholly lost our belief that it is delightful to meet artists who have given us pleasure.

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If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional and common sense continual.

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Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.

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May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence Write it down write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery.

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I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed - and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

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The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.

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The world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young, act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution that would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curse of the world. Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.

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Female beauty in an important Minor Sacrament which cannot be received too often I am no sure at all that the neglect of it does not constitute a sin of some kind.

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If you attack Stupidity you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of public life.

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The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.

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Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars.

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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.

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You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.

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If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear. . .

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Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best.

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The average politician goes through a sentence like a man exploring a disused mine shaft-blind, groping, timorous and in imminent danger of cracking his shins on a subordinate clause or a nasty bit of subjunctive.

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