Robertson Davies on Life

"I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead."

"Any enjoyment or profit we get from life, we get Now; to kill Now is to abridge our own lives."

"The life of Man is a struggle with Nature and a struggle with the Machine; when Nature and the Machine link forces against him, Man hasn't a chance."

"But what ailed Little Eva St. Clair, in Uncle Tom's Cabin? What carried off Little Nell?...They have no clear symptoms, and seem to die of Ingrowing Virtue."

"If you attack stupidity, you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of public life, and you will make small progress against it."

"Nobody can find fault with legitimate ambition, but when the wealth of the spiritual and intellectual life is reduced to a formula for overcoming sales resistance, we protest."

"In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries."

"Long toil and short leisure are part of the heavy price we pay for our North American standard of living. It is reputed to be the highest in the world, and so it should be, for it is bought at an inordinate price."

"Are you going to be just kind of a walking monument to a job, or are you going to have some kind of really significant inner life of your own? Because the external things — the job, the house, the this, the that — do not really fill the place inside."

"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."

"A life given to determining the best form for the letters of the alphabet — does it seem extraordinary to you? But no day passes that our eyes do not fall upon something that was influenced, and made better, by this extraordinary, eccentric Scot, and if that is not a life well spent, I should be interested in a better definition."

"The search for the sense of humour is as fruitless and as enduring as the hunt for the unicorn; the really wise man knows that the unicorn, being no reality but a life-enhancing myth, must never be hunted, and may only be glimpsed by the well-disposed and the lucky; it cannot be captured, and it is encountered only by indirection."

"He was born into, and seems never to have questioned, that English "class system" which has been so much abused in the present century. Indeed, several governments have announced their intention of abolishing it, and the most recent prime minister to retire showed her egalitarian principles by accepting the title of Baroness Thatcher."

"One of the things that puzzles me is that so few people want to look at life as a totality and to recognize that death is no more extraordinary than birth. When they say it's the end of everything they don't seem to recognize that we came from somewhere and it would be very, very strange indeed to suppose that we're not going somewhere."

"When the book appeared, a few reviewers found this plot incredible; they accused Professor O'Neal of having too little art to persuade them to suspend their disbelief in his assertion that Shakespeare was a precocious girl. Perhaps this was because they knew that the life of literary people is usually devoid of exciting external incident."

"As a boy, I remember serials in Chums in which a Terrible Trio — comprising a conjuror boy, a ventriloquist boy, and an India-rubber boy — made life intolerable for everybody who was so unfortunate as to come near them. It kept me in side-shaking fits of laughter and stirred me to ill-fated excesses of emulation, which a lack of talent and even of rubberiness quickly subdued."

"The fall of France must have been a bitter pill to Calvé. She had a poor opinion of Germans, both as people and as artists. It is sad to imagine what her last days may have been in her "robber-baron's castle" as Peggy Wood calls it. But one thing is certain; when death came, Calvé met it with spirit. No one who knew so well how to greet life could possibly fail to know how to greet death."

"It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity — the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension — can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion."

"I have never consciously "used" humour in my life. Such humour as I may have is one of the elements in which I live. I cannot recall a time when I was not conscious of the deep, heaving, rolling ocean of hilarity that lies so very near the surface of life in most of its aspects. If I am a moralist — and I suppose I am — I am certainly not a gloomy moralist, and if humour finds its way into my work it is because I cannot help it."

"As for an afterlife, there has been a general decline in the general acceptance of it as a certainty, and though a few rationalists may be pleased, to many people this has added a new terror to death. We are reluctant, in the main, to consider the disappearance of ourselves and consequently all we feel and know. Every man's death is, literally, the end of a world if he dies without hope. We have exchanged Gone Elsewhere for Gone Nowhere."

"Not long ago a friend of mine opened the door of the garage at her summer cottage, and found a man inside who had hanged himself about two months before; what is more he had been cut down. She is deeply anxious to know why he hanged himself; if he hanged himself or was hanged; who cut him down; what it was about her garage that appealed to his morbid fancy. She will probably never know any of these things. It is thus that life falls short of the movies."

"You have to come to terms with yourself and your place in the scheme of life — something a good many people don't want to do. In the last century we have extended the normal life-span. Many seem to believe that this means we have extended the period when they should enjoy the things they enjoyed in youth. But I don't think they realize that we've also expanded the period of life when we can learn to think, feel, and experience the largeness and the splendor of life."

"When the time came for Pompadour herself to die, she confessed, was given her viaticum, and was from that time forth forbidden to see her lover. And when her body was borne away from Versailles, Louis was thought to have behaved rather badly because he watched the sad procession from a balcony. Let no one suppose that these people lived lives that were any more free from religious and neighbourly censure than the adulterers in our smallest Canadian villages. Even wealth and privilege could not wholly insulate them from that frost."

"Once or twice I have tried to talk to film people about my ugly heroine. I explain to them the extraordinary psychological fascination of the medieval legend of the Loathly Damsel, whose splendour of spirit is confined within a hideous body, and she becomes beautiful only when she is understood and loved. I advise you not to talk to resolutely Hollywood minds about the Loathly Damsel. Their eyes glaze, and their cigars go out, and behind the lenses of their horn-rimmed spectacles I see the dominating symbol of their inner life: it is a dollar sign."

"It seems to me that most of us get all the adventure we are capable of digesting. Personally, I have never had to fight a dozen pirates single-handed, and I have never jumped from a moving express-train onto the back of a horse, and I have never been discovered in the harem of the Grand Turk. I am glad of all these things. They are too rich for my digestion, and I do not long for them. I have all the close shaves and narrow squeaks in my life that my constitution will stand, and my daily struggles with bureaucrats, taxgatherers and uplifters are more exhausting than any encounters with mere buccaneers on the Spanish Main."

"William Prynne's Histrio-Matrix, the Player's Scourge or Actor's Tragedie , a fat book of more than a thousand pages, which forms an admirable compilation of all the Puritan arguments against the theatre. The work is a classic of abuse and a monument to the misplaced scholarship and zeal of its author. Unluckily for Prynne he referred to women actors as 'notorious whores' meaning a group of French actresses who had appeared at Blackfriars in 1629; the reference was taken to apply to Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies who were about to perform a pastoral at Whitehall. She made a Star Chamber matter of it and Prynne was fined 35,000 pounds, set in the pillory, shorn of his ears, branded and imprisoned for life. The SL on his cheeks he construed as Stigmata Laudis and bore bravely; it is pleasant to know that the life sentence was revoked by the Parliament of the Commonwealth, for although Prynne was a small-souled and cantankerous zealot with a maggot about homosexuality, he was a courageous fighter and a master of invective."

"An old friend of mine who died recently at a great age was, in infancy, held on the knee of an elderly godmother who had been, in her infancy, held on the knee of yet another godmother who had been held on the knee of Queen Anne, who died in 1714. Viewed unsympathetically, this is nothing, a chance association-by-knees; yet if we cherish life, and are not mere creatures of death and sepulcher, deluded by the notion that only our own experience is real and our demise the end of the world, we see in it a reminder that we are all beads on a string — separate yet part of a unity."