Parenting & Family Quote by Robertson Davies

Davies lands the line like a small detonator: the cozy ideal of the "happy childhood" is recast not as a gift, but as a kind of sabotage. The joke is barbed because it inverts a cultural script most people treat as untouchable. Instead of treating early comfort as the foundation for success, he frames it as an anesthetic - something that dulls the hungers, grievances, and imaginative compensations that often power a life of ambition or art.

The intent isn't to romanticize trauma so much as to needle the middle-class piety that equates well-adjustedness with greatness. "Promising life" is doing sly work here. Promise, in the modern sense, is often measured as visible drive, eccentricity, refusal. Davies suggests that those traits are frequently forged by friction: disappointment, loneliness, the need to reinvent oneself. A truly happy childhood can make adulthood feel like maintenance rather than conquest. If you've never had to improvise an inner life, why build one?

As a novelist steeped in psychology, myth, and social satire, Davies also hints at how narratives get made. Stories require conflict; so do selves. A childhood without sharp edges produces fewer obsessions, fewer engines for transformation. The subtext is uncomfortable on purpose: we prefer to believe good upbringing guarantees good outcomes, but Davies is poking at the darker truth that comfort can breed blandness, entitlement, or fear of risk. It's a warning disguised as a one-liner: ease is not character, and contentment is not destiny.