James Branch Cabell Quotes
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They tell me that truth lies somewhere at the bottom of a well, and at virtually the door of our home is a most notable if long dried well. Our location is thus quite favorable, if we but keep patience.
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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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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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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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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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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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Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
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James Branch Cabell made this book so that he who wills may read the story of mans eternally unsatisfied hunger in search of beauty. Ettarre stays inaccessible always and her lovliness is his to look on only in his dreams. All men she must evade at the last and many ar the ways of her elusion.
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There is no gift more great than love.
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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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The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.
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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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Life is very marvelous … and to the wonders of the earth there is no end appointed.
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Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?
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Patriotism is the religion of hell.
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At what cost, now, may one attempt to write perfectly of beautiful happenings?
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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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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 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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Thus he labors, and loudly they jeer at him; - That is, when they remember he still exists. Who. you ask, is this fellow? - What matter names? He is only a scribbler who is content.
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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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The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills - and as immortal.