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Fifth Business Quotes
Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
…What was wrong between Diana and me was that she was too much a mother to me, and as I had had one mother, and lost her, I was not in a hurry to acquire another–not even a young and beautiful one with whom I could play Oedipus to both our hearts’ content. If I could manage it, I had no intention of being anybody’s own dear laddie, ever again.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
…the Conservative party found him an embarrassment because he was apt to criticize the party leader in public, the Liberals naturally wanted to defeat him, and the newspapers were out to get him. It was a dreadful campaign on his part, for he lost his head, bullied his electors when he should have wooed them, and got into a wrangle with a large newspaper, which he threatened to sue for libel. He was defeated on election day so decisively that it was obviously a personal rather than a political rejection.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
…so Leola thought that a modest romance with a hero in embryo could do no harm – might even be a patriotic duty.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
When I had to leave she kissed me on both cheeks – a thing she had never done before – and said, ‘There’s just one thing to remember; whatever happens, it does no good to be afraid.’ So I promised not to be afraid, and may even have been a fool enough to think I could keep my promise.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
On the whole, we treat the Devil shamefully, and the worse we treat Him the more He laughs at us.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
I was afraid and did not know what I feared, which is the worst kind of fear.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
He [Jesus] had a terrible temper, you know, undoubtedly inherited from His Father.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
But what I knew then was that nobody-not even my mother-was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself in the surface.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
I seemed to be the only person I knew without a plan that would put the world on its feet and wipe the tear from every eye. No wonder I felt like a stranger in my own land.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
You are still young enough to think that torment of the spirit is a splendid thing, a sign of a superior nature. But you are no longer a young man; you are a youngish middle aged man, and it is time you found out that these spiritual athletics do not lead to wisdom.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill-defined though it was, that a serious study of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical but not a cruel mind, would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast of mind had some of its origin in our pit, which had much the character of a Protestant Hell. I was probably the most entranced listener to a sermon the Reverend Andrew Bowyer preached about Gehenna, the hateful valley outside the walls of Jerusalem, where outcasts lived, and where their flickering fires, seen from the city walls, may have given rise to the idea of a hell of perpetual burning. He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason then why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
Faustina is a great work of the Creator. She has nothing of what you call brains; she doesn’t need them for her destiny… It is to be glorious for a few years: not to outlive some dull husband and live on his money till she is eighty, going to lectures and comparing the attractions of winter tours that offer the romance of the Caribbean.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
That was what stuck in the craws of all the good women of Deptford: Mrs Dempster had not been raped, as a decent woman would have been—no, she had yielded because a man wanted her. The subject was not one that could be freely discussed even among intimates, but it was understood without saying that if women began to yield for such reasons as that, marriage and society would not last long. Any man who spoke up for Mrs Dempster probably believed in Free Love. Certainly he associated sex with pleasure, and that put him in a class with filthy thinkers like Cece Athelstan.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
I was a talking lover, which most women hate.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
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