Quotes by James Branch Cabell

“Tell the rabble my name is 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 ...”

“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 di...”

“The Terrible and Marvellous History of Manuel Pig-Tender That Afterwards Was Named Manuel the Redeemer.”

“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 di...”

“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 ...”

“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 tha...”

“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, T...”

“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.”

“The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills — and as immortal.”

“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.”

“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 h...”

“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 ...”

“At what cost, now, may one attempt to write perfectly of beautiful happenings?”

“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 ...”

“Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, — and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?”

“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?”

“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 ...”

“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 ...”

“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 muc...”