Robertson Davies Quotes

I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.

I do the gardening.

What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.

Gardening is not my thing. You're digging in the dirt, and then a couple of months later, something happens.

I worked in a watercress bed, picking weeds out of watercress when I was at school. It was awful.

I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.

I wish you wouldn't walk in and out of my mind as though it was a railway station!

We go, in winter's biting wind, On many a short-lived winter day, With aching back but willing mind To dig and double dig the clay.

When the mind is full of any one subject, that subject seems to recur with extraordinary frequency - it appears to pursue or to meet us at every turn: in every conversation that we hear in every book we open, in every newspaper we take up, the reigning idea recurs; and then we are surprised, and exclaim at these wonderful coincidences.

Ponder just let it happen. It's because their minds are so often involved with deep and problematic matters, he told himself, that their mouths are allowed to wander around making a nuisance of themselves.

The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principle subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.

Just as I sit down to meditate, all the vilest subjects in the world come up. The whole thing is nauseating. Why should the mind think thoughts I do not want it to think? I am as it were a slave to the mind.

I'm not saying find someone and ask them if you can mow their grass for ten dollars. I'm saying find weeds that need pulling and pull them.

The mind goes on working no matter how we try to hold it back.

My mind wanders a lot, but fortunately it's too weak to go very far.

Stay out of my mind. You certainly weren't invited.' Her hands went to her hips. 'And just for the record, your mind needs to be washed out with soap! Half the things you think we're going to do are never going to happen. I could never look at you again.

Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?

Talking over the things which you have read with your companions fixes them on the mind.

Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will. They have built all the roads, cities and machines in the world, written all the books, spoken all the words, and, in fact done everything that man has accomplished with matter. Character might be a sense defined as a plexus of motor habits.

Much to his annoyance, a thought popped into his mind. It was very clear and very distinct, and he had now come to recognize these thoughts for what they were. His instinct was to resist them.

Those who would assail the Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.

Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?

Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed.

You're supposed to get tired planting bulbs. But it's an agreeable tiredness.

Love with complications. Scenery was the last thing on my mind.