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The quotations are arranged by author name.
Current counts: Authors: 8,146. Quotations: 38,970
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| Robertson Davies
A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life. A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera. A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best. Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion. I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat. Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself. 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. May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence? Write it down: write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery. Only a fool expects to be happy all the time. Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. The average politician goes through a sentence like a man exploring a disused mine shaft-blind, groping, timorous and in imminent danger of cracking his shins on a subordinate clause or a nasty bit of subjunctive. The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring. The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity. The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in
fact, a return to the idealized past.There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity. To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser. Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard. Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year. |
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