James Branch Cabell: Trending quotes (page 5)

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“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

Horvendile, in The High Place : A Comedy of Disenchantment (1923), Ch. XVI: Some Victims of Flamberge.

Imagination , Happiness

“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

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

Life , Age , Beauty

“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 book Figures of Earth

Manuel, in Ch. XXXIX : The Passing of Manuel
Figures of Earth (1921)

Life , God , Way , Failure

“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

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

Time

“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

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

“Tell the rabble my name is Cabell.”

James Branch Cabell

A rhyme he made to indicate the proper pronunciation of his name, as quoted in The Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature (1962) edited by Max J. Herzburg, p. 132

“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 book Figures of Earth

Miramon, in Ch. XXXII : The Redemption of Poictesme
Figures of Earth (1921)

Life , God , Way , Learning

“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

Beyond Life (1919) Ch. VI : Which Values the Candle, § 2, p. 173

Time

“In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.”

James Branch Cabell

Coth, in Book Four : Coth at Porutsa, Ch. XX : Idolatry of an Alderman
The Silver Stallion (1926)

Travel

“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 book Figures of Earth

Miramon, in Ch. IV : In the Doubtful Palace
Figures of Earth (1921)

Success , Victory

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

James Branch Cabell

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

Beauty

“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 book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 23 : Economic Considerations of Piety

Men , Chance , Reading

“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 book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 24 : Deals with Pen Scratches

Life , Dreams , Thinking , Sense

“Life is very marvelous … and to the wonders of the earth there is no end appointed.”

James Branch Cabell

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

Life

“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 book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 14 : Peculiar Conduct of a Personage

Truth , Wealth

“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

Beyond Life (1919; 1927 edition), Author's Note

War , World , Personality , Dead

“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 book The Cream of the Jest

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

Life

“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

Niafer, in Book Ten : At Manuel's Tomb, Ch. LXIX : Economics of Jurgen
The Silver Stallion (1926)

People , World , Dreams

“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

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

Life , Death , Youth

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

James Branch Cabell

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

Beauty