A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.
Robertson Davies Quotes
I was not sure I wanted to issue orders to life; I rather liked the Greek notion of allowing Chance to take a formative hand in my affairs.
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.
The whole world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look 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 curses of the […]
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
“She was an Artist, and to her the human body was simply a Mass, with a variety of Planes… Nobody connected with the Little Theatre quite liked to explain to Mrs Crundale that the breasts of several well-known young ladies of Salterson, though undoubtedly Planes, had other connotations, and could not fittingly be unveiled at […]
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.
Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconsciously as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug.
To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.
The people who are always monkeying with these great books to make them fully (comprehensible) have no friend in me, for in their realm the fully comprehensible is not worth comprehending.
