James Branch Cabell Quotes
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Life is very marvelous … and to the wonders of the earth there is no end appointed.
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Hey, my masters, lords and brothers, ye that till the fields of rhyme, Are ye deaf ye will not hearken to the clamor of your time?
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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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Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.
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I take it that I must be the eternal playfellow of time. For piety and common-sense and death are rightfully time's toys; and it is with these three that I divert myself.
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Always the fact remains that to the mentally indolent this book may well seem a volume of disconnected short stories. All of us being more or less mentally indolent, this possibility constitutes a dire fault.
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The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.
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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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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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From the dawn of the day to the dusk he toiled, Shaping fanciful playthings, with tireless hands, - Useless trumpery toys; and, with vaulting heart, Gave them unto all peoples, who mocked at him, Trampled on them, and soiled them, and went their way.
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Dreaming a dream to prize, Is wishing ghosts to rise; And, if I had the spell To call the buried - well, Which one would I?
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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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Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
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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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The man was not merely very human; he was humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.
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Whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at heart.
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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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I am content. While my shrewd fellows rode about the world to seek and to attain power and wisdom, I have elected, as and unpractical realist, to follow after beauty.
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Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams.
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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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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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Criticism, whatever may be its pretensions, never does more than to define the impression which is made upon it at a certain moment by a work wherein the writer himself noted the impression of the world which he received at a certain hour.
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The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills - and as immortal.