Robertson Davies Quotes

If you don't belong somewhere, that outsider status you have gives you perspective. Of course, another word for outsider is 'exile,' and that's not fun at all.

My background sets me apart. I've never been able to relate to many people. I've always been the outcast child.

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

Misanthropy is born, I think, out of an almost oppressive sense of loneliness, a conviction that there's no one on earth who understands you. I don't think misanthropes hate people: They hate that people hate them.

I've always felt outside of things; I've always felt different.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

I never belonged anywhere. I just felt like a creature from another planet.

I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.

I've always been an outsider to some extent.

There aren't any people aligned with me passionately.

I feel like an alien sometimes, where I don't feel like I belong anywhere.

'Greatest American Hero,' I really dug that as a kid because it had an alienation to it, where he was given a gift and didn't know why, and yet he was forced to do something with it, and he was very much an out-of-place character who was trying to cope with his own surroundings, and I can kind of relate to that guy.

Not Waving but Drowning Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he's dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said. Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.

This is the ultimate cruelty, isn't it? That I can talk and talk and to anyone listening, it's only air--too rich a diet to be swallowed by a mundane world.

With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

I have been a stranger in a foreign land.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

I've never really fit in anywhere.

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.

I was the black sheep of the family, and my mother never really understood me.

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

I feel like a visitor just about everywhere.

Being sent away to school was no different from my biological mother giving me away.

I don't belong on this earth. I always feel out of place - like a visitor.