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James Branch Cabell Quotes
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James Branch Cabell was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles-lettres. Cabell was well-regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare."Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and satirical. H. L. Mencken disputed Cabell's claim to romanticism and characterized him as "really the most acidulous of all the anti-romantics. His gaudy heroes ... chase dragons precisely as stockbrockers play golf." Cabell saw art as an escape from life, but once the artist creates his ideal world, he finds that it is made up of the same elements that make the real one.Interest in Cabell declined in the 1930s, a decline that has been attributed in part to his failure to move out of his fantasy niche despite the onset of World War II. Alfred Kazin said that "Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe". Wikipedia  

✵ 14. April 1879 – 5. May 1958
James Branch Cabell photo
James Branch Cabell: 130   quotes 0   likes

James Branch Cabell Quotes

“I do that which I do in every place. Here also, at the gateway of that garden into which time has not entered, I fight with time my ever-losing battle, because to do that diverts me.”

James Branch Cabell

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

Time , Fight

“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 much faith and love and kindliness which we can share with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly, simple, generous living we approach perfection in the highest and most lovely of all arts.... But you, I think, have always comprehended this.”

James Branch Cabell

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

Faith , Dreams , Art , Perfection

“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 actual world they tell about, but a vastly superior place where the Dream is realized and everything which in youth we knew was possible comes true. It is a world we have all glimpsed, just once, and have not ever entered, and have not ever forgotten. So people like my little tales.... Do they induce delusions? Oh, well, you must give people what they want, and literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.”

James Branch Cabell

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

Dreams , People , Nature , Universe

“This is a strong magic. This is a sententious magic. They had warned me that I would here face my own destruction, that I would here face the most pitiable and terrible of all things: and I face here that which I have made of life, and life of me. I shudder; I am conscious of every appropriate sentiment. Nevertheless, sir, I must venture the suggestion that mere, explicit allegory as a form of art is somewhat obsolete.”

James Branch Cabell

Guivric, in Book Six : In the Sylan's House, Ch. XL : Economics of Glaum-Without-Bones
The Silver Stallion (1926)

Strong , Life , Art

“In Philistia to make literature and to make trouble for yourself are synonyms,… the tumblebug explained.”

James Branch Cabell

I know, for already we of Philistia have been pestered by three of these makers of literature. Yes, there was Edgar, whom I starved and hunted until I was tired of it: then I chased him up a back alley one night, and knocked out those annoying brains of his. And there was Walt, whom I chivvied and battered from place to place, and made a paralytic of him: and him, too, I labelled offensive and lewd and lascivious and indecent. Then later there was Mark, whom I frightened into disguising himself in a clown's suit, so that nobody might suspect him to be a maker of literature: indeed, I frightened him so that he hid away the greater part of what he had made until after he was dead, and I could not get at him. That was a disgusting trick to play on me, I consider. Still, these are the only three detected makers of literature that have ever infested Philistia, thanks be to goodness and my vigilance, but for both of which we might have been no more free from makers of literature than are the other countries.…
The Judging of Jurgen (1920)

Literature , Making love

“Thus he labors, and loudly they jeer at him; — That is, when they remember he still exists. Who. you ask, is this fellow?”

James Branch Cabell

What matter names?
He is only a scribbler who is content.
"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

“The man was not merely very human; he was humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

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

Dreams , Faith , Making love

“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!”

James Branch Cabell

are none the less valuable for being quoted.
The Gander, in Book Seven : What Saraïde Wanted, Ch. XLV : The Gander Also Generalizes
The Silver Stallion (1926)

Universe , Dreams , Animals , Sense

“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 attempts to remedy this. It may be defined as an expurgated edition of Nature.”

James Branch Cabell

Writing on Charles Dickens, in "In Defence of an Obsolete Author" in William and Mary College Monthly (November 1897), VII, p. 3-4

Art , Nature , Falseness , Life