Frasi di Robertson Davies
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Robertson Davies è stato uno scrittore canadese, prolifico autore di teatro e di narrativa, nel quale lo stile satirico si unisce all'indagine psicologica per fornire una caratteristica rappresentazione della società. Wikipedia

✵ 28. Agosto 1913 – 2. Dicembre 1995

Robertson Davies: 286 citazioni2 Mi piace

Robertson Davies frasi celebri

“Dio fece il gatto perché l'uomo potesse avere il piacere di coccolare la tigre.”

Robertson Davies

Origine: Da The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks.

“Gli scrittori amano i gatti perché sono creature tranquille, amabili e sagge, e i gatti amano gli scrittori per le stesse ragioni.”

Robertson Davies

Origine: Citato in Alice Ki, Il gatto: se lo conosci lo educhi, Newton Compton editori, Roma, 2013, p. 158 http://books.google.it/books?id=Ncg-AQAAQBAJ&pg=PT158.

“Nessun popolo al mondo ti fa sentire così piccolo quanto quello inglese.”

Robertson Davies

“Un librettista è un facchino nel mondo dell'opera.”

Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies: Frasi in inglese

“Perhaps the word for the feeling I mean is serenity, a high acceptance, a recognition that Heracleitus's doctrine of eternal flow is a great truth, and while we may not, in ourselves, find the moment when the one element changes into the other, that moment will come and the consciousness of its inevitability may give us courage in adversity, and balance in good fortune.”

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Robertson Davies

Opera and Humour (1991)

“It used to be fashionable for authors to have their pictures taken with dogs, but the dogs always looked like models hired from an advertising agency, and probably were.”

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Robertson Davies

mehitabel (1959).

“Love, though sweet, must know its proper station
And never seek to rival education.”

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Robertson Davies

The Golden Ass (1999)

“Celtic civilization was tribal, but by no means savage or uncultivated. People who regarded the theft of a harp from a bard as a crime second only to an attack on the tribal chieftain cannot be regarded as wanting in cultivated feeling.”

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Robertson Davies

Scottish Folklore and Opera (1992).

“The stones were dancing now. O yes, they were dancing! But it was not hopping and skipping like jigs or reels, nor was it the dismal revolving of a ballroom. Not a stone moved from its place, but they rocked and turned, slowly and with the greatest dignity, as if to say: "We are the lords of the earth and of the water. We shall stand when all has gone. We shall endure until better things come. But what can be better than we? So we shall endure forever."”

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Robertson Davies

Harper of the Stones (1986).

“It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.”

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Robertson Davies

A Conversation about Dr. Canon's Cure (1982).

“There can be no doubt that Samuel Marchbanks is one of the choice and master spirits of this age. If there were such a volume as Who Really Ought To Be Who his entry would require several pages.”

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Robertson Davies

Introduction.
The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks (1985)

“It is particularly displeasing to hear professional critics using the term "layman" to describe people who are amateurs and patrons of those arts with which they are themselves professionally concerned. The fact that the critic gets money for knowing something, and giving public expression to his opinion, does not entitle him to consider the amateur, who may be as well informed and as sensitive as himself, an outsider.”

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Robertson Davies libro A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“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.”

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Robertson Davies

How to Be a Collector (1995).

“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.”

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Robertson Davies

"You Should Face Up to Your Death, Says Author".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

“She made a great deal of money in her time and she spent it lavishly. Speaking of herself and her colleagues at the Metropolitan she said: "We were a race of giants." Quite true, and in case you don't know it, being a giant is a very expensive business. The cost of food and drink, not merely for oneself but for one's fellow-giants and one's scores of attendant gnomes, is a very considerable item. And the cost of jewels for a female giant is really fabulous.”

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Robertson Davies

"Emma Calvé" (1942).

“The US, for historical reasons, mistrusts the concept of a welfare state, and this mistrust shows itself nakedly under present US government, which commits uncounted billions of the national wealth to what it calls defence, and is close-fisted in giving money to plans which would ameliorate the grinding poverty of a great part of its people. Quite simply, in Canada you could not get away with that.”

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Robertson Davies

Literature in a Country Without a Mythology (1988).

“Motherhood and all the sentimentality that goes with Mother's Day was not congenial to the Greek mind. They were a remarkably unsentimental people; they had no particular reverence for children, nor did they regard them as a special and privileged portion of society. It would not have occurred to them to erect a vast temple to Mickey Mouse. They left that for us.”

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Robertson Davies

The Noble Greeks.

“And how often do we meet the man who prefaces his remarks with: "I was reading a book last night…" in the too loud, overenunciated fashion of one who might be saying: "I keep a hippogryph in my basement."”

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Robertson Davies libro A Voice from the Attic

Reading confers status.
A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“I have known far too many university graduates, in this country and in my own, who, as soon as they have received the diploma which declares them to be of Certified Intelligence, put their brains in cold storage and never use them again until they are hauled away to the mortuary.”

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Robertson Davies

Reading (1990)

“In spite of all this chaos, however, most people seem to lead humdrum lives, and badly want livening up. Do you think we should organize a Chaos-of-the-Month Club, guaranteeing to supply all members with something really unnerving every thirty days?”

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Robertson Davies

Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack (1967)

“Why are so many people ashamed of having intelligence and using it? There is nothing democratic about such an attitude. To pretend to be less intelligent that one is deceives nobody and begets dislike, for intelligence cannot be hidden; like a cough, it will out, stifle it how you may. No man has ever won commendation for standing at less than his full height, either physically, morally, or intellectually.”

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Robertson Davies libro A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“We mistrust anything that too strongly challenges our ideal of mediocrity.”

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Robertson Davies

The Noble Greeks (1993).

“This is a work which ought to be in every library in Canada; perhaps, after twenty-five years or so, it might silence the recurrent hubbub about nude paintings which is a feature of our national life. Yes, they are erotic. Yes, madam, the painters are often naughty men, and the models are sometimes bad girls. But there are elements involved in the painting of the nude which draw upon what is highest in art and express what is highest in mankind. Now, may we please look at the pictures?”

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Robertson Davies

Review of The Painter's Eye and The Nude (1957).

“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.”

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Robertson Davies

"You Should Face Up to Your Death, Says Author".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

“Several children present me with scraps of paper for autographs: obviously don't know who I am and don't care. I sign "Jackie Collins" and they go away quite content.”

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Robertson Davies

Diary entry describing his appearance at the Gothenburg Book Fair (7 September 1989), published in Happy Alchemy (1999), p. 332.

“Women always think that if they tell a man not to be pompous that will shut him up, but I am an old hand at that game. I know that if a man bides his time his moment will come.”

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Robertson Davies

The Great Queen is Amused.
High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories (1982)

“I am sure that I would not make a good taxidermist; the temptation to improve upon nature would certainly be too strong for me. Think how easy it would be, when stuffing somebody's pet terrier, to slip a couple of human glass eyes into a sockets, instead of the usual buttons. Then the owner would really be justified in saying that his pet looked almost human. If I were stuffing this two-headed calf, for instance, I could not resist making one head smile and the other one frown, so that they looked like masks of Comedy and Tragedy.”

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Robertson Davies libro The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

“Chaucer shares on the literary stock marker have been rising during the past ten years, owing chiefly to the enthusiasm, literary gifts and scholarship of an Oxford don, Nevill Coghill, and secondarily to the British Broadcasting Corporation. The fluctuations of the literary market are familiar to everyone; sometimes there is a fierce flutter in a virtually unknown commodity (like the John Donne boom in the twenties); occasionally an almost dead commodity bursts in new life (as in the Trollope boom of the forties); Foreign Moderns (Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Sagan) are eagerly pushed but are apt to collapse suddenly, wiping out those critics who have invested too heavily in them; in the USA the Deep South and Proletarian Anguish are solid, though all else fluctuates unpredictably.”

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Robertson Davies

Review of the Canterbury Tales (1957).

“Whoever declares a child to be "delicate" thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.”

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Robertson Davies libro The Cunning Man

Part 1, section 6.
The Cunning Man (1994)

“If you can, and if you are a playgoer and a filmgoer, you should be able to find voices for all the characters in the books you read.”

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Robertson Davies libro A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“I have no skills with machines. I fear them, and because I cannot help attributing human qualities to them, I suspect that they hate me and will kill me if they can.”

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Robertson Davies

Reading (1990)

“It is not as though "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" was a precept from which splendid fiction could not be drawn; it is rather that what these small-time rebels choose to do is so trivial, so cheap, and in the end, so dreary.”

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Robertson Davies libro A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“So, I was to talk about "Opera as Related to Literature", was I not? And because the subject is so vast, I have wandered here and there, trying to illuminate, as if with a candle, a vast chamber full of fascinating corners, mysterious with mirrors, and echoing with some of the loveliest music ever written. I have not succeeded on any high level, but then, I never expected to do so. But perhaps I have thrown out an idea or two which you would like to consider for yourselves.”

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Robertson Davies

Opera for the Man Who Reads Hamlet (1989).

“The King had every privilege except that of being at ease. Pompadour provided the atmosphere in which that final luxury was possible. She did not do this, as anyone who thinks about the matter for twenty seconds will know, by twenty years of rapt contemplation of the ceilings of Versailles. Indeed, Pompadour was not a physically ardent woman, and love-making tired her. After about eight years of their association Louis XV did not sleep with her… But it was to Pompadour that he talked, and it was to Pompadour that he listened.”

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Robertson Davies

Madame de Pompadour.

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