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James Branch Cabell

109 quotes

“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.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am quite content, in this Comedy of Appearances, to follow the old romancers' lead. "Such and such things were said and done by our great Manuel," they say to us, in effect: "such and such were the appearances, and do you make what you can of them." I say that, too, with the addition that in real life, also, such is the fashion in which we are compelled to deal with all happenings and with all our fellows, whether they wear or lack the gaudy name of heroism.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They of Poictesme narrate that in the old days when miracles were as common as fruit pies, young Manuel was a swineherd, living modestly in attendance upon the miller's pigs. They tell also that Manuel was content enough: he knew not of the fate which was reserved for him.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had a quiet way with the girls, and with the men a way of solemn, blinking simplicity which caused the more hasty in judgment to consider him a fool. Then, too, young Manuel was very often detected smiling sleepily over nothing, and his gravest care in life appeared to be that figure which Manuel had made out of marsh clay from the pool of Haranton. This figure he was continually reshaping and realtering. The figure stood upon the margin of the pool; and near by were two stones overgrown with moss, and supporting a cross of old worm-eaten wood, which commemorated what had been done there.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now I wonder what it is you find in that dark pool to keep you staring so?" the stranger asked, first of all. "I do not very certainly know," replied Manuel "but mistily I seem to see drowned there the loves and the desires and the adventures I had when I wore another body than this. For the water of Haranton, I must tell you, is not like the water of other fountains, and curious dreams engender in this pool.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are now a famous champion, that has crowned with victory a righteous cause for which many stalwart knights and gallant gentlemen have made the supreme sacrifice, because they knew that in the end the right must conquer. Your success thus represents the working out of a great moral principle, and to explain the practical minutiae of these august processes is not always quite respectable.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am Manuel, and I follow after my own thinking and my own desire. Of course it is very fine of me to be renouncing so much wealth and power for the sake of my wonderful dear Niafer: but she is worth the sacrifice, and, besides, she is witnessing all this magnanimity, and cannot well fail to be impressed.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Manuel gave it up, and shrugged. Well, let us conquer as we may, so that God be on our side. Miramon replied: "Never fear! He shall be, in every shape and attribute.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I shall never of my own free will expose the naked soul of Manuel to anybody. No, it would be no pleasant spectacle, I think: certainly, I have never looked at it, nor did I mean to. Perhaps, as you assert, some power which is stronger than I may some day tear all masks aside: but this will not be my fault, and I shall even then reserve the right to consider that stripping as a rather vulgar bit of tyranny.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I must tell you that in this moment all doubt as to my attested worth went out of me, who had redeemed a kingdom, and begotten a king, and created a god. So you waste time, my friend, in trying to convince me of all human life's failure and unimportance, for I am not in sympathy with this modern morbid pessimistic way of talking. It has a very ill sound, and nothing whatever is to be gained by it.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am Manuel. I have lived in the loneliness which is common to all men, but the difference is that I have known it. Now it is necessary for me, as it is necessary for all men, to die in this same loneliness, and I know that there is no help for it.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I seem to see only the strivings of an ape reft of his tail, and grown rusty at climbing, who has reeled blunderingly from mystery to mystery, with pathetic makeshifts, not understanding anything, greedy in all desires, and always honeycombed with poltroonery. So in a secret place his youth was put away in exchange for a prize that was hardly worth the having; and the fine geas which his mother laid upon him was exchanged for the common geas of what seems expected.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The stranger pointed at the unfinished, unsatisfying image which stood beside the pool of Haranton, wherein, they say, strange dreams engender.... "What is that thing?" the stranger was asking, yet again... "It is the figure of a man," said Manuel, "which I have modeled and remodeled, and cannot get exactly to my liking. So it is necessary that I keep laboring at it, until the figure is to my thinking and my desire.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, the redemption which we as yet await (continued Imlac), will be that of Kalki, who will come as a Silver Stallion: all evils and every sort of folly will perish at the coming of this Kalki: true righteousness will be restored, and the minds of men will be made as clear as crystal.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) first seen 1759 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Epigraph, based upon the style of Samuel Johnson in The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), using a fictional reference to Imlac the philosopher in Johnson's tale.
“I agree with Freydis that, for various reasons, nobody ever, quite, knew Manuel well. The hero of "The Silver Stallion" is, thus, no person, but an idea, — an idea presented at the moment of its conception... I mean, of course, the idea that Manuel, who was yesterday the physical Redeemer of Poictesme, will by and by return as his people's spiritual Redeemer.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each in his day, and within howsoever limited a circle of adherents, awakened that sustaining faith which appears vitally necessary to men's contentment, in the legend of the all powerful Redeemer who will come again, to-morrow. The theme of this book, then, is how that legend came to attach itself to Dom Manuel; how, in particular, that legend afterward affected, or did not affect, those persons who had known Dom Manuel almost intimately; and how in the end nobody believed in it any longer except Donander Veratyr. But Donander Veratyr was God.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no gift more great than love.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I must, here again, in mere honesty, I must distinguish. I mean that I think you know, as well as I do, love is not a gift which any man can give nor any person hope long to retain. Ah, no, madame! we shrug, we smilingly allow romanticists their catchwords: meanwhile it remains the veriest axiom, among realists like you and me, that love too is but a loan.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everywhere in the world people were expecting the latter coming of one or another kickshaw messiah who would remove the discomforts which they themselves were either too lazy or too incompetent to deal with; and nobody had anything whatever to gain with electing for peculiarity among one's fellow creatures and a gloomier outlook. Even Coth saw that.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These young people were getting a calm and temperate, but a positive, gratification out of being virtuous. There must, then, lurk somewhere deep hidden in humanity a certain trend to perverse delight in thus denying and curbing its own human appetites. And since the comparatively intelligent and unregenerate persons were all profiting by their fellows' increased forbearance, altogether everybody was reaping benefit. This damnable new generation was, because of its insane aspiring, happier than its fathers had been under the reign of candor and common sense.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is it not a pity, Guivric, that this Kalki will not come in our day, and that we shall never behold his complete glory? I cry a lament for that Kalki who will someday bring back to their appointed places high faith and very ardent loves and hatreds; and who will see to it that human passions are in never so poor a way to find expressions in adequate speech and action. Ohé, I cry a loud lament for Kalki! The little silver effigies which his postulants fashion and adore are well enough: but Kalki is a horse of another color.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is a strong magic. This is a sententious magic. They had warned me that I would here face my own destruction, that I would here face the most pitiable and terrible of all things: and I face here that which I have made of life, and life of me. I shudder; I am conscious of every appropriate sentiment. Nevertheless, sir, I must venture the suggestion that mere, explicit allegory as a form of art is somewhat obsolete.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is very marvelous ... and to the wonders of the earth there is no end appointed.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not seek to copy nature. I, on the contrary, create to divert me such faith and dreams as living among men would tend to destroy. But as it is, my worshipers depart from me heartedly, in this grey corridor, and they are devoid of fear and parvanimity; for the effect of my singing, like that of all great singing, is to fill my hearers with a sentiment of their importance as moral beings and the greatness of their destinies.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing ... nothing in the universe, is of any importance, or is authentic to any serious sense, except the illusions of romance. For man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. These axioms — poor, deaf and blinded spendthrift! — are none the less valuable for being quoted.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is a pageant that passes very quickly, going hastily from one darkness to another darkness with only ignes fatui to guide; and there is no sense in it. I learned that, Kerin, without moiling over books. But life is a fine ardent spectacle; and I have loved the actors in it: and I have loved their youth and high-heartedness, and their ungrounded faiths, and their queer dreams, my Kerin, about their own importance and about the greatness of the destiny that awaited them, — while you were piddling after, of all things, the truth!”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People must have both their dreams and their dinners in this world, and when we go out of it we must take what we find. That is all.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the gate of the garden, beside the lingham post which stood there in eternal erection, sat a boy who was diverting himself by whittling, with a small green-handled knife, a bit of cedar-wood into the quaint shaping which the post had. His hair was darkly red: and now, as he regarded Alfgar with brown and wide-set eyes, the face of this boy was humorously grave, and he nodded now, as the complacent artist nods who looks upon his advancing work and finds all to be near his wishes.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I fight against the gluttony of time with so many very amusing weapons — with gestures and with three attitudes and with charming phrases; with tears and with tinsel, and with sugar-coated pills, and with platitudes slightly regilded. Yes, and I fight him also with little mirrors wherein gleam confusedly the corruptions of lust, and ruddy loyalty, and a bit of moonshine, and the pure diamond of the heart's desire, and the opal cloudings of human compromise: but, above all, I fight that ravening dotard with the strength of my own folly.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My immortality has sharp restrictions. For it is at a price that I pass down the years, as yet, in eternal union with the witch-woman whose magic stays — as yet — more strong than the magic of time. The price is that I only of her lovers many not ever hope to win Ettare. This merely is permitted me: that I may touch the hand of Etarre in the moment I lay that hand in the hand of her last lover. I give, who may not ever take... So do I purchase an eternally unfed desire against which time — as yet — remains powerless.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have made at worst some neat, precise and joyous little tales which prevaricate tenderly about the universe and veil the pettiness of human nature with screens of verbal jewelwork. It is not the actual world they tell about, but a vastly superior place where the Dream is realized and everything which in youth we knew was possible comes true. It is a world we have all glimpsed, just once, and have not ever entered, and have not ever forgotten. So people like my little tales. ... Do they induce delusions? Oh, well, you must give people what they want, and literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are talking over telephones, as Shakespeare could not talk; We are riding out in motor-cars where Homer had to walk; And pictures Dante labored on of mediaeval Hell The nearest cinematograph paints quicker, and as well. But ye copy, copy always; — and ye marvel when ye find This new beauty, that new meaning, — while a model stands behind, Waiting, young and fair as ever, till some singer turn and trace Something of the deathless wonder of life lived in any place. Hey, my masters, turn from piddling to the turmoil and the strife! Cease from sonneting, my brothers; let us fashion songs from life.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With the passage of time, whatever a man had done, whether for good or evil, with the man's bodily organs, left the man's parish unaffected: only a man's thoughts and dreams could outlive him, in any serious sense, and these might survive with perhaps augmenting influence: so that Kennaston had come to think artistic creation in words — since marble and canvas inevitably perished — was the one, possibly, worth-while employment of human life. But here was a crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston this seemed the one real tragedy that could be staged on earth....”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To-day alone was real. Never was man brought into contact with reality save through the evanescent emotions and sensations of that single moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a second, which was passing now — and it was in the insignificance of this moment, precisely, that religious persons must believe. So ran the teachings of all dead and lingering faiths alike. Here was, perhaps, only another instance of mankind's abhorrence of actualities; and man's quaint dislike of facing reality was here disguised as a high moral principle. That was why all art, which strove to make the sensations of a moment soul-satisfying, was dimly felt to be irreligious. For art performed what religion only promised.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their love-affairs, their maxims, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradox — that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I quite fixedly believe the Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, that face on other worlds than ours. And some of us, I think, once in a while get a peep through these windows. But we are not permitted to get a long peep, or an unobstructed peep, nor very certainly, are we permitted to see all there is — out yonder. The fatal fault, sir, of your theorizing is that it is too complete. It aims to throw light upon the universe, and therefore is self-evidently moonshine. The Wardens of Earth do not desire that we should understand the universe, Mr. Kennaston; it is part of Their appointed task to insure that we never do; and because of Their efficiency every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source