Robertson Davies Sez

What am I to say about my family--the matrix from which everything I am and have written arises...whatever I may have undergone or felt, I am not going to present them as minor characters in a drama of which I am the leading player;  they too had their troubles and dead or alive they have their rights.  Nothing they did was done in malice, but in the hurly-burly of daily living,  in which one stumbles from hour to hour under burdens that are nobody else's affair.

--Robertson Davies

"What will make him an old man is a frightened clinging to the values of the first half of his life. We have all seen these juvenile dotards whose boast is that they are just as young as their sons or their grandsons; they do not realize what a pitiful boast that is. They prate about their sympathy with youth, but they mean only the superficialities and ephemera of youth. Many of the sad smashups in marriages that we see among middle-aged people have their origin in this attempt to dodge an inescapable fact. The values that are proper and all-absorbing during the first half of life will not sustain a man during the second half. If he has the courage and wisdom to advance courageously into the new realm of values and emotions he will age physically, of course, but his intellectual and spiritual growth will continue, and will give satisfaction to himself and to all those associated with him. And such courage and wisdom are by no means rare; they may show themselves among many people who have never thought along those lines at all but who have a knack for living life wisely; and they also are to be found among those who regard self-awareness as one of the primary duties of a good life. Paradoxically, such people are on better terms with youth than the shrivelled Peter Pans who dare not be their age." --Robertson Davies.

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

― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

 

“If you don't hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you'll get.”

― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

I could have told them a thing or two about that, but my time for instructing people is over. Let 'em wallow in whatever nonsense pleases 'em, say I.  --Robertson Davies,  World of Wonder

 

“Ah, critics! How unforgiving they are toward anything that isn't, in some special way, known only to them, absolutely first-rate. Do they ever guess, I wonder, how much energy and guts and sheer talent it takes to be second-rate?”

― Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits