Robertson Davies

“The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.”

“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 what would be excessive in their grandfather...”

“The love of truth lies at the root of much humour.”

“As a general thing, people marry most happily with their own kind. The trouble lies in the fact that people usually marry at an age when they do not really know what their own kind is.”

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

“A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.”

“The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.”

“Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are...”

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

“I am quite a wise old bird, but I am no desert hermit who can only prophesy when his guts are knotted with hunger. I am deep in the old man’s puzzle, trying to link the wisdom of the body wi...”

“But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory--humorous, poignant, humane allegory--disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperien...”

“...so Leola thought that a modest romance with a hero in embryo could do no harm - might even be a patriotic duty.”

“Now I want you to remember something because I don't think we shall meet again very soon. It is this; however fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and howe...”

“The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean and pretty. The peony was unchaste, dishevelled as peonies must be, and at the height of i...”

“In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast...”

“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 in the surface.”

“Love affairs are for emotional sprinters; the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.”

“The women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something nearer to whole men. Just as we complete them, of course; it’s not a one-...”

“I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered ha...”

“Before she continued her search she sat in his revolving desk chair, and wept for the passing of time, and the necessary death of the well-loved, wise old man.”