James Branch Cabell Quotes
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There is no gift more great than love.
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A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book 'means' thereafter, perforce, - both grammatically and actually, - whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.
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You, whom I made for man's worship when earth was younger and fairer, hearken, and learn why I breathe new life into husks from my scrap-heaps! Gods of old days, discrowned, disjected, and treated as rubbish, hark to the latest way of the folk whose fathers you succored! They have discarded you utterly.
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I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.
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Some few there must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothing very insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful happenings.
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People marry for a variety of reasons and with varying results. But to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.
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If the Author will it, there may be appended to any comedy an afterpiece. Meanwhile, so far as I may judge, the life of Manuel ends here.
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Patriotism is the religion of hell.
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'Eh, Manuel, and will you re-model the world?' 'Who knows?' says Manuel, in the high pride of his youth. 'At all events, I do not mean to leave it unaltered.'
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Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
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I am not so wonderful but that in the hour of my triumph I am frightened by my own littleness. Look you, Niafer, I had thought I would be changed when I had become a famous champion, but for all that I stand posturing here with this long sword, and am master of the hour and of the future, I remain the boy that last Thursday was tending pigs.
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A novel, or indeed any work of art, is not intended to be a literal transcription from Nature. … Life is a series of false values. There it is always the little things that are greatest. Art attempts to remedy this. It may be defined as an expurgated edition of Nature.
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The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills - and as immortal.
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Men have begun to observe and classify, they turn from creation to Criticism. … It is the Fashion to be a wit. … one must be able to conceal indecency with elegant diction; manners are everything, morals nothing.
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Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, - and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?
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I do that which I do in every place. Here also, at the gateway of that garden into which time has not entered, I fight with time my ever-losing battle, because to do that diverts me.
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Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?
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Coth admitted that, say what you might as to the Manuel who had really lived, the squinting rascal did as a rule know what he was talking about.
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Life is very marvelous … and to the wonders of the earth there is no end appointed.
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It spurred me to such action as I took, - but it has robbed me of sugared eloquence, it has left me chary of speech. It is necessary that I climb very high because of my love for you, and upon the heights there is silence.
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At what cost, now, may one attempt to write perfectly of beautiful happenings?
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The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.
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Kennaston no longer thought of himself as a man of flesh-and-blood moving about a world of his compeers. Or, at least, that especial aspect of his existence was to him no longer a phase of any particular importance.
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I was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books - brave books that would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people, and re-awaken joy and magnanimity.