404 Quotes by Robertson Davies

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-way thing. Leola and I, when romance was stripped away, were too much alike; our strengths and weaknesses were too nearly the same. Together we would have doubled our gains and our losses, but that isn’t what love is.

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.

I wish people weren't so set on being themselves, when that means being a bastard.

He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.

I was afraid and did not know what I feared, which is the worst kind of fear.

Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.

Sexual thrills are not all physical, and although Parlabane was an unlikely seducer, even on the intellectual plane, it was clear that his desire was, by this prolonged tickling, to bring me to an orgasm of the mind.

—If Francis has really made up his soul [...], what lies ahead of him? Hasn't he achieved the great end of life?—[...] Having got his soul under his eye, so to speak, Francis must now begin to understand it and be worthy of it [...]. Making up a soul isn't an end; it's the new beginning in the middle of life.