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There is no gift more great than love.
James Branch Cabell -
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.
James Branch Cabell
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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.
James Branch Cabell -
I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.
James Branch Cabell -
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
James Branch Cabell -
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.
James Branch Cabell -
People marry for a variety of reasons and with varying results. But to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.
James Branch Cabell -
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.
James Branch Cabell
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Patriotism is the religion of hell.
James Branch Cabell -
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.
James Branch Cabell -
Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, - and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?
James Branch Cabell -
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.
James Branch Cabell -
The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills - and as immortal.
James Branch Cabell -
'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.'
James Branch Cabell
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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.
James Branch Cabell -
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.
James Branch Cabell -
Whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at heart.
James Branch Cabell -
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.
James Branch Cabell -
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.
James Branch Cabell -
I also begin where he began, and follow wither the dream led him. Meanwhile, I can but entreat you to remember it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.
James Branch Cabell
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Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?
James Branch Cabell -
Life is very marvelous … and to the wonders of the earth there is no end appointed.
James Branch Cabell -
In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.
James Branch Cabell -
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.
James Branch Cabell