Robertson Davies
Robertson Davies
William Robertson Davies, CC, OOnt, FRSC, FRSLwas a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", a term Davies is variously said to have gladly accepted for himself and to have detested. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 August 1913
common common-sense occasional passion pleasures seek
If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional and common sense continual.
love life passion
If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.
passionate actors welcome
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.
strong party passion
The pleasures of love are for those who are hopelessly addicted to another living creature. The reasons for such addiction are so many that I suspect they are never the same in any two cases. It includes passion but does not survive by passion; it has its whiffs of the agreeable vertigo of young love, but it is stable more often than dizzy; it is a growing, changing thing, and it is tactful enough to give the addicted parties occasional rests from strong and exhausting feeling of any kind.
carpet carry flying free good ground horse imagination
Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground -- not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.
fact full future notion past people return whose
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact a return to the idealized past
beauty cannot constitute female minor neglect received sacrament sin sure
Female beauty is an important Minor Sacrament which cannot be received too often; I am not at all sure that neglect of it does not constitute a sin of some kind
writing asking serious
To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.
men luck make-things-happen
What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
admission free leave taxation
Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night.
appears term
Other-directed appears to be nothing more than a sociological term for weak-minded
easy future life man pessimism short view
Pessimism is a very easy way out when you're considering what life really is, because pessimism is a short view of life - If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of man or the future of the world
approaches conceived confirm decline examined glorious newspaper past period reader short
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.
earth english people small
No people on earth can make you feel so small as the English