Quotes by James Branch Cabell

“No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.”

“I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.”

“Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong”

“That moving carcass does but very inadequately symbolizes you....a subtle and immortal spirit.”

“...[we] has left nothing durable to signalize his stay upon this planet.[we]eventually dies to the honest regret of [our] associates.”

“Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic”

“Patriotism is the religion of hell.”

“alcohol played the midwife”

“The optimist claims we live in the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears this is true.”

“There is no memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.”

“The optimist claims we live in the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears this is true.”

“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 everythi...”

“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, ...”

“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 atte...”

“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 pict...”

“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.”

“I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always c...”

“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 s...”

“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 M...”

“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 the...”