James Branch Cabell: Quotes about life

The Epilogue : Which is the proper ending of all comedies; and heralds, it may be, an afterpiece.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Context: I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are...

Manuel, in Ch. I : How Manuel Left the Mire
Figures of Earth (1921)
Context: I shall not ever return to you, my pigs, because, at worst, to die valorously is better than to sleep out one's youth in the sun. A man has but one life. It is his all. Therefore I now depart from you, my pigs, to win me a fine wife and much wealth and leisure wherein to discharge my geas. And when my geas is lifted I shall not come back to you, my pigs, but I shall travel everywhither, and into the last limits of earth, so that I may see the ends of this world and may judge them while my life endures. For after that, they say, I judge not, but am judged: and a man whose life has gone out of him, my pigs, is not even good bacon.

Manuel, in Ch. I : How Manuel Left the Mire
Figures of Earth (1921)
Context: I shall not ever return to you, my pigs, because, at worst, to die valorously is better than to sleep out one's youth in the sun. A man has but one life. It is his all. Therefore I now depart from you, my pigs, to win me a fine wife and much wealth and leisure wherein to discharge my geas. And when my geas is lifted I shall not come back to you, my pigs, but I shall travel everywhither, and into the last limits of earth, so that I may see the ends of this world and may judge them while my life endures. For after that, they say, I judge not, but am judged: and a man whose life has gone out of him, my pigs, is not even good bacon.

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 27 : Evolution of a Vestryman
Context: The transfiguring touch was to come, it seemed from a girl's lips; but it had not; he kissed, and life remained uncharmed.... at the bottom of his heart, he was still expecting the transfiguring touch to come, some day, from something he was to obtain or do, perhaps to-morrow.... Then he had by accident found out the sigil's power...

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)
Context: We are talking over telephones, as Shakespeare could not talk;
We are riding out in motor-cars where Homer had to walk;
And pictures Dante labored on of mediaeval Hell
The nearest cinematograph paints quicker, and as well. But ye copy, copy always; — and ye marvel when ye find
This new beauty, that new meaning, — while a model stands behind,
Waiting, young and fair as ever, till some singer turn and trace
Something of the deathless wonder of life lived in any place.
Hey, my masters, turn from piddling to the turmoil and the strife!
Cease from sonneting, my brothers; let us fashion songs from life.

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!

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: 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.

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

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

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

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

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

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

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

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

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

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