James Branch Cabell: Trending quotes (page 3)

Saraïde, in Book Seven : What Saraïde Wanted, Ch. XLVII : Economics of Saraïde
The Silver Stallion (1926)
Context: 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!

Book Five : "Mundus Vult Decepi", Ch. XXIX : The Grumbler's Progress
The Silver Stallion (1926)
Context: 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.

"To Sinclair Lewis : A Foreword"
Figures of Earth (1921)
Context: 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.

Horvendile, in Ch. 13 : What a Boy Thought
The Way of Ecben (1929)
Context: 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.

Quotes from "The Blind Desire", using the pseudonym "Charles A. Ballance" in William and Mary College Monthly (September 1897), V, p. 51
Context: 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.

Manuel, in Ch. XXXII : The Redemption of Poictesme
Figures of Earth (1921)
Context: 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."

The Epilogue : Which is the proper ending of all comedies; and heralds, it may be, an afterpiece.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Context: 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 it's 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.

Source: Figures of Earth (1921), Ch. I : How Manuel Left the Mire
Context: 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.

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 27 : Evolution of a Vestryman
Context: 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.

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 40 : Which Mr. Flaherty Does Not Quite Explain
Context: 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."

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 40 : Which Mr. Flaherty Does Not Quite Explain
Context: 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."

"Ballad of the Double-Soul"
The Certain Hour (1916)
Context: 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.

The Gander, in Book Seven : What Saraïde Wanted, Ch. XLV : The Gander Also Generalizes
The Silver Stallion (1926)
Context: 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.

Horvendille, in Book Six : In the Sylan's House, Ch. XXXIX : One Warden Left Uncircumvented
The Silver Stallion (1926)
Context: I consider the saga of no lord of the Silver Stallion to be worth squabbling over. Your sagas in the end must all be perverted and engulfed by the great legend about Manuel. No matter how you strive against that legend, it will conquer: no matter what you may do or suffer, my doomed Guivric, your saga will be recast until it conforms in everything to the legend begotten by the terrified imaginings of a lost child. For men dare not face the universe with no better backing than their own resources; all men that live, and that go perforce about this world like blundering lost children whose rescuer is not yet in sight, have a vital need to believe in this sustaining legend about the Redeemer: and the wickedness and the foolishness of no man can avail against the fond optimism of mankind.

Horvendile, in Ch. 13 : What a Boy Thought
The Way of Ecben (1929)
Context: 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.

Ch. 37 : Invention of the Lovely Vampire http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/CABELL/ch37.htm
Jurgen (1919)
Context: Jurgen returned again toward Barathum; and, whether or not it was a coincidence, Jurgen met precisely the vampire of whom he had inveigled his father into thinking. She was the most seductively beautiful creature that it would be possible for Jurgen's father or any other man to imagine: and her clothes were orange-colored, for a reason sufficiently well known in Hell, and were embroidered everywhere with green fig–leaves.
"A good morning to you, madame," says Jurgen, "and whither are you going?"
"Why, to no place at all, good youth. For this is my vacation, granted yearly by the Law of Kalki—"
"And who is Kalki, madame?"
"Nobody as yet: but he will come as a stallion. Meanwhile his Law precedes him, so that I am spending my vacation peacefully in Hell, with none of my ordinary annoyances to bother me."
"And what, madame, can they be?"
"Why, you must understand that it is little rest a vampire gets on earth, with so many fine young fellows like yourself going about everywhere eager to be destroyed."

Manuel, in Ch. XXXII : The Redemption of Poictesme
Figures of Earth (1921)
Context: 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."

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 26 : "Epper Si Muove"
Context: 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.

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)
Context: 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.