James Branch Cabell: Trending quotes

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James Branch Cabell: 260 quotes0 likes

“I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.”

Coth, in Book Four : Coth at Porutsa, Ch. XXVI : The Realist in Defeat
The Silver Stallion (1926)

“Whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at heart.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

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

“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 his surroundings. And it is he, in consequence, who of all people most faithfully and compactly exhibits the impress of his times and his times' tendencies, not merely in his writings — where it conceivably might be just predetermined affectation — but in his personality.”

James Branch Cabell

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

“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,
Trampled on them, and soiled them, and went their way.”

James Branch Cabell

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

“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 and magnanimity.”

James Branch Cabell

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

“You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 13 : Suggesting Themes of Universal Appeal

“Good and evil keep very exact accounts… and the face of every man is their ledger.”

James Branch Cabell

Ch. 5 : Requirements of Bread and Butter http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/CABELL/ch05.htm <br class="br">Jurgen (1919)

“American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison…. Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be an unprejudiced judge. The tale seems to me one of those many books which have profited, very dubiously indeed, by having obtained, in one way of another, the repute of being indecent.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Author's Note (1929 edition)
The Cream of the Jest (1917)

“Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams.”

James Branch Cabell

Manuel, in Book Four : Coth at Porutsa, Ch. XXV : Last Obligation upon Manuel
The Silver Stallion (1926)

“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

Book Five : "Mundus Vult Decepi", Ch. XXVII : Fond Motto of a Patriot
The Silver Stallion (1926)

“Religion, of course, assured him that the answer to his query was, in various books, explicitly written, in very dissimilar forms. But Kennaston could find little to attract him in any theory of the universe based upon direct revelations from heaven. Conceding that divinity had actually stated so-and-so, from Sinai or Delphi or Mecca, and had been reported without miscomprehension or error, there was no particular reason for presuming that divinity had spoken veraciously: and, indeed all a available analogues went to show that nothing in nature dealt with its inferiors candidly.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

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

“Kennaston could find in the past — even he, who was privileged to view the past in its actuality, rather than through the distorting media of books and national pride — no suggestion as to what, if anything, he was expected to do while his physical life lasted, or to what, if anything, this life was a prelude. Yet that to-day was only a dull overture to to-morrow seemed in mankind an instinctive belief. All life everywhere, as all people spent it, was in preparation for something that was to happen to-morrow.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

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

“Before 1914 had well begun to make the world safe for hypocrisy, these stories had blended into one continuous and fairly long Comedy of Evasion, called then In the Flesh, but a little later rechristened The Cream of The Jest…”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Author's Note (1929 edition)
The Cream of the Jest (1917)

“"Why is a Kennaston?" he asked himself — thus whimisically voicing a real desire to know if human beings were intended for any especial purpose. Most of us find it more comfortable, upon the whole, to stave off such queries — with a jest, a shrug, or a Scriptural quotation, as best suits personal taste; but Kennaston was "queer" enough to face the situation quite gravely.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

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

“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 dire fault.”

James Branch Cabell

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

“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 world which he received at a certain hour.”

James Branch Cabell

Epigraph
The Certain Hour (1916)

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

James Branch Cabell

Title of a fictional work that he "quotes" from at the start of the book.
The Certain Hour (1916)

“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 that body we share we may not spare; but the Gods have need of mirth.”

James Branch Cabell

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

“Love, I take it, must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Horvendile, in Ch. 2 : Introduces the Ageless Woman
The Cream of the Jest (1917)

“There is no gift more great than love.”

James Branch Cabell

Morvyth, in Book Two : The Mathematics of Gonfal, Ch. X : Relative to Gonfal's Head
The Silver Stallion (1926)