404 Quotes by Robertson Davies

I don’t think Emily was quite up to the demands of being everything to Chips. Love lays heavy burdens on the loved one, sometimes.

A world without corruption would be a strange world indeed – and a damned bad world for lawyers, let me say.

You are like a fire: you warm me.

When I had to leave she kissed me on both cheeks – a thing she had never done before – and said, ‘There’s just one thing to remember; whatever happens, it does no good to be afraid.’ So I promised not to be afraid, and may even have been a fool enough to think I could keep my promise.

We tend to think human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible – that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways.

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.

Humour very often consists of shrewd perceptions about people. It’s usually fun at someone’s expense. Nowadays if you’re funny at anybody’s expense they run to the UN and say, “I must have an ombudsman to protect me.” You hardly dare have a shrewd perception about anybody.

It is woefully hard to find good, or even merely literate, writers, and they laugh at me when I say that sloppy, go-as-you-please writing carries less authority than decent prose. You must remember our public, they say. And indeed that is what I do, and I think the public is fully able to deal with the best they can produce. Patronizing the public, and assuming that it hangs, breathless, upon what it reads in the papers, is almost the worst of journalistic sins.

How they chirped over their cups.