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James Branch Cabell

109 quotes

“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 (1879–1958) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Comedies of William Congreve" in William and Mary College Monthly (September 1897), V, p. 41, as quoted in William L. Godshalk, "James Branch Cabell at William and Mary: the Education of a Novelist", The William and…
“Nay, 'tis not fitting that we should require Within this World but Raiment, Food and Fire; Powerless Atoms of Eternity, Why should we hope to know of Something higher? This Knowledge could but add, not lessen, Woe; The Magian who To-day forms fire with snow Shares with the Sudra in Infinity. We come from Nothing and to Nothing go. So best consent, although with forced grace, Upon this dingy Ball to run our race Untrammeled with the thoughts of higher things, Until we reach the shadowy Stopping place.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quotes from "The Blind Desire", using the pseudonym "Charles A. Ballance" in William and Mary College Monthly (September 1897), V, p. 51
“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 (1879–1958) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Writing on Charles Dickens, in "In Defence of an Obsolete Author" in William and Mary College Monthly (November 1897), VII, p. 3-4
“If we assiduously cultivate our powers of exaggeration, perhaps we, too, shall obtain the Paradise of Liars. And there Raphael shall paint for us scores and scores of his manifestly impossible pictures ... and Shakespeare will lie to us of fabulous islands far past 'the still-vex'd Bermoothes,' and bring us fresh tales from the coast of Bohemia. For no one will speak the truth there, and we shall all be perfectly happy.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Telling the Truth" in William and Mary College Monthly (November 1897), VII, p. 53-55
“While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Beyond Life (1919) Ch. VI: Which Values the Candle, § 2, p. 173
“The comedy is always the same. In the first act the hero imagines a place where happiness exists. In the second he strives towards that goal. In the third he comes up short or what amounts to the same thing he achieves his goal only to find that happiness lies a little further down the road.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Horvendile, in The High Place: A Comedy of Disenchantment (1923), Ch. XVI: Some Victims of Flamberge.
“Yet this Charteris speaks from a perished world, he babbles of a civilization as dead as Babylon's... [In 1918, for example,] Woodrow Wilson was filling, accurately, the former station of William McKinley and of James K. Polk; and in many quarters was being taken quite as seriously as had been his predecessors during their own personally directed wars for moral principles so consistently elevated that they have never yet sunk into human comprehension.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Beyond Life (1919; 1927 edition), Author's Note
“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 (1879–1958) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Note on Cabellian Harmonics" in Cabellian Harmonics (April 1928)
“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 (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sad hours and glad hours, and all hours, pass over; One thing unshaken stays: Life, that hath Death for spouse, hath Chance for lover; Whereby decays Each thing save one thing: — mid this strife diurnal Of hourly change begot, Love that is God-born, bides as God eternal, And changes not; — Nor means a tinseled dream pursuing lovers Find altered by-and-bye, When, with possession, time anon discovers Trapped dreams must die, — For he that visions God, of mankind gathers One manlike trait alone, And reverently imputes to Him a father's Love for his son.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Terrible and Marvellous History of Manuel Pig-Tender That Afterwards Was Named Manuel the Redeemer.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the beginning the Gods made man, and fashioned the sky and the sea, And the earth's fair face for man's dwelling-place, and this was the Gods' decree: — "Lo, We have given to man five wits: he discerneth folly and sin; He is swift to deride all the world outside, and blind to the world within: So that man may make sport and amuse Us, in battling for phrases or pelf, Now that each may know what forebodeth woe to his neighbor, and not to himself.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For this is the song of the double-soul, distortedly two in one, — Of the wearied eyes that still behold the fruit ere the seed be sown, And derive affright for the nearing night from the light of the noontide sun. For one that with hope in the morning set forth, and knew never a fear, They have linked with another whom omens bother; and he whispers in one's ear. And one is fain to be climbing where only angels have trod, But is fettered and tied to another's side who fears that it might look odd.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And one would worship a woman whom all perfections dower, But the other smiles at transparent wiles; and he quotes from Schopenhauer. Thus two by two we wrangle and blunder about the earth, And that body we share we may not spare; but the Gods have need of mirth.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills — and as immortal.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man of genuine literary genius, since he possesses a temperament whose susceptibilities are of wider area than those of any other, is inevitably of all people the one most variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he, in consequence, who of all people most faithfully and compactly exhibits the impress of his times and his times' tendencies, not merely in his writings — where it conceivably might be just predetermined affectation — but in his personality.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At what cost, now, may one attempt to write perfectly of beautiful happenings?”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, do the Overlords of Life and Death always provide some obstacle to prevent what all of us have known in youth was possible from ever coming true?”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Dream, as I now know, is not best served by making parodies of it, and it does not greatly matter after all whether a book be an epic or a directory. What really matters is that there is so much faith and love and kindliness which we can share with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly, simple, generous living we approach perfection in the highest and most lovely of all arts. ... But you, I think, have always comprehended this.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison.... Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be an unprejudiced judge. The tale seems to me one of those many books which have profited, very dubiously indeed, by having obtained, in one way of another, the repute of being indecent.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Author's Note (1929 edition)
“Before 1914 had well begun to make the world safe for hypocrisy, these stories had blended into one continuous and fairly long Comedy of Evasion, called then In the Flesh, but a little later rechristened The Cream of The Jest...”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Author's Note (1929 edition)
“This book did not get for me any general recognition. It got for me, instead, something in every way more valuable. For it was The Cream of the Jest which first made for me in the seventeenth year of my writing, a few warm friends who but a little later were to fight in my behalf very nobly, and with wholly heroic tenacity... If few writers have met with more smug, more prurient, or more disingenuous opponents, no writer whatever, I think has found more faithful allies.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Author's Note (1929 edition)
“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.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You must permit that I begin it in my own way, with what may to you at first seem dream-stuff. For I commence at Storisende, in the world's youth, when the fourth Count Emmerick reigned in Poictesme, having not yet blundered into the disfavor of his papal cousin Adrian VII.... With such roundabout gambits alone can some of us approach — as one fancy begets another, if you will — to proud assurance that life is not blind and aimless business; not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that we ourselves may (by and by) be strong and excellent and wise.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love, I take it, must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You embody all that I was ever able to conceive of beauty and fearlessness and strange purity. Therefore it is evident I do not see in you merely Count Emmerick's third sister, but, instead, that ageless lovable and loving woman long worshipped and sought everywhere in vain by all poets.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are many of our so-called captains on industry who, if the truth were told, and a shorter and uglier word were not unpermissible, are little better than malefactors of great wealth.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at heart.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was not his to choose from what volume or on which page thereof he would read; accident, as it seemed, decided that; but the chance-opened page lay unblurred before him, and he saw it with a clarity denied to other men of his generation.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest cliches of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets, here to, moved as they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest....”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why is a Kennaston?" he asked himself — thus whimisically voicing a real desire to know if human beings were intended for any especial purpose. Most of us find it more comfortable, upon the whole, to stave off such queries — with a jest, a shrug, or a Scriptural quotation, as best suits personal taste; but Kennaston was "queer" enough to face the situation quite gravely.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion, of course, assured him that the answer to his query was, in various books, explicitly written, in very dissimilar forms. But Kennaston could find little to attract him in any theory of the universe based upon direct revelations from heaven. Conceding that divinity had actually stated so-and-so, from Sinai or Delphi or Mecca, and had been reported without miscomprehension or error, there was no particular reason for presuming that divinity had spoken veraciously: and, indeed all a available analogues went to show that nothing in nature dealt with its inferiors candidly.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kennaston could find in the past — even he, who was privileged to view the past in its actuality, rather than through the distorting media of books and national pride — no suggestion as to what, if anything, he was expected to do while his physical life lasted, or to what, if anything, this life was a prelude. Yet that to-day was only a dull overture to to-morrow seemed in mankind an instinctive belief. All life everywhere, as all people spent it, was in preparation for something that was to happen to-morrow.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The transfiguring touch was to come, it seemed from a girl's lips; but it had not; he kissed, and life remained uncharmed. ...at the bottom of his heart, he was still expecting the transfiguring touch to come, some day, from something he was to obtain or do, perhaps to-morrow.... Then he had by accident found out the sigil's power...”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, I suspect — windows which face on other worlds than ours: and They permit this-or-that man to peer out fleetingly, perhaps, just for the joke's sake; since always They humorously contrive matters so this man shall never be able to convince his fellows of what he has seen or of the fact that he was granted any peep at all. The Wardens without fail arrange what we call — gravely, too — "some natural explanation.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is true I have not told you everything. Why should I? No Author ever does.... With Felix Kennaston — or, if you prefer it so, with Horvendile, — rests safe this secret and peculiar knowledge as to how the life of Manuel may yet repair to its first home after some seven centuries of exile. Thus will the traveller return — by and by — to the place of his starting; the legend of the second coming of the Redeemer will be justified, in, at all events, my lesser world; and the tale to Manuel's life will have come again, as it did once beside the pool of Haranton, full circle.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source