The gift that isn’t big enough to make a mark, but is too big to leave the possessor in peace. And so they can’t be content to be Sunday painters, or poets who write for a few friends, or composers whose handful of delicate little settings of Emily Dickinson can’t find a singer. It’s a special sort of hell.

— Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies Quotes

All eras of history are an equal distance from eternity.

— Robertson Davies

We come to God in little steps, not a leap, and that love of police-court truth you think so much of comes very late on the way, if it comes at all. What is truth? as Pilate asked; I’ve never pretended that I could have told him. I’m just glad when a boozer sobers up, or a man stops beating his woman, or a crooked lad tries to go straight. If it makes him boast a bit, that’s not the worst harm it can do. You unbelieving people apply cruel, hard standards to us who believe.

— Robertson Davies

I was a talking lover, which most women hate.

— Robertson Davies

She was a romantic, and as I had never met a female romantic before it was a delight to me to explore her emotions. She wanted to know all about me, and I told her as honestly as I could; but as I was barely twenty, and a romantic myself, I know now that I lied in every word I uttered – lied not in fact but in emphasis, in colour, and in intention.

— Robertson Davies

Wit and high spirits and a sense of fun- yes, they’re wonderful things. But a sense of humour- a real one- is a rarity and can be utter hell. Because it’s immoral, you know, in the real sense of the word: I mean, it makes its own laws; and it possesses the person who has it like a demon. Fools talk about it as though it were the same thing as a sense of balance, but believe me, it’s not. It’s a sense of anarchy, and a sense of chaos. Thank God it’s rare.

— Robertson Davies

I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.

— Robertson Davies

She’s too much like him in temperament. Married couples should complement each other, and not merely double their losses. There’s much to be said for the square peg in the round hole, as the Cubist told the Vorticist.

— Robertson Davies

He blew his nose resoundingly. “B natural,” said he, “my cold drops more than a full tone every hour. Obviously I am dying.

— Robertson Davies

She had an ability, invaluable in a weak person, to persuade herself that whatever was inevitable had her full approval, and was in some measure her own doing.

— Robertson Davies

Hector was sent to his office to wait, while Rat-face was restored to such limited consciousness as his heredity and his fate permitted him to enjoy.

— Robertson Davies

Success? It has the shortest half-life of any known substance.

— Robertson Davies

I know well enough how people in love drag the name of the loved one into every conversation, simply to utter that magical word, to savor it on the tongue.

— Robertson Davies

Nobody told me he was an American.” “Not American – Canadian.” “Well, what’s the difference?” “They’re touchier, that’s what.

— Robertson Davies

If Heloise had been more clear-headed she’d have seen that Abelard was a frightful nerd in human relationships.

— Robertson Davies

New Money wore dinner suits, which it called tuxedos, and smoked big cigars from which it removed the band before lighting up – an unthinkable solecism, for.

— Robertson Davies

Who ever talks about a lifelong, intimate friendship expressing itself in the broadest possible range of conversation? If people are really alive and alert it ought to go on and on, prolonging life because there is always something more to be said.

— Robertson Davies

However much science and educational theory and advanced thinking you pump into a college or a university, it always retains a strong hint of its medieval origins.

— Robertson Davies

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.

— Robertson Davies

You and I have precisely the same amount of time as the Old Masters – twenty-four hours in every day. There is no more, and never any less.

— Robertson Davies

What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us. I know that sounds horrible and cruel, considering what happens to a lot of people, and it can’t be the whole explanation. But it’s a considerable part of it.

— Robertson Davies
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