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
life views years
Pessimism is a very easy way out because it is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today, you can't help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of mankind.
years fifteen matter
Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality.
long-ago years mind
Canada, having few indigenous prejudices, has been compelled to import them from elsewhere, duty-free, and it is the rare Canadian who is not shaken, at some time in the year, by "old, unhappy, far-off things / And battles long ago", like Wordsworth's solitary reaper. We are a nation of immigrants, and not happy in our minds.
country night years
The Wild Hunt is known in all Celtic countries; it is a huntsman with a pack of hounds who is seen or heard to rush through the country. Those who see him are doomed to die. The writer heard the Wild Hunt quite distinctly one night in Wales several years ago, but has not suffered any ill effects from it as yet.
love years sick
Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year.
everybody hero likely meet monster romance
It isn't everybody who is the hero of his own romance, and when we meet one he is likely to be a fascinating monster
career creative marrying plain promising sort woman wrecked wrong
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.
fear humor lights opinions people possibilities power present question received suggest suspicious unexpected
The people who fear humor - and there are many -are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities
common common-sense occasional passion pleasures seek
If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional and common sense continual.
books books-and-reading friend fully great people realm worth
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
column condemn dry leaves senile types weary
He types his labored column -- weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn.
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.
earth english people small
No people on earth can make you feel so small as the English