James Branch Cabell Quotes

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

No lady is ever a gentleman.

People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.

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.

Everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken atwill 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.

The optimist sees a light at the end of the tunnel, the realist sees a train entering the tunnel, the pessimist sees a train speeding at him, hell for leather, and the machinist sees three idiots sitting on the rail track. "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true."

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

The only way of rendering life endurable is to drink as much wine as one can come by.

Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?

A book , once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book "means" thereafter, perforce, both grammatically and actually, whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.

Literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.

For although this was a very heroic war, with a parade of every sort of high moral principle, and with the most sonorous language employed upon both sides, it somehow failed to bring about either the reformation or the ruin of humankind: and after the conclusion of the murdering and general breakage, the world went on pretty much as it has done after all other wars, with a vague notion that a deal of time and effort had been unprofitably invested, and a conviction that it would be inglorious to say so.

Creeds matter very little... The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label.

Patriotism is the religion of hell.

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

What is man that his welfare be considered? An ape who chatters of kinship with the archangels while he very filthily digs for groundnuts. And yet I perceive that this same man is a maimed God. He is condemned under penalty to measure eternity with an hourglass and infinity with a yardstick and what is more, he very nearly does it.

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

The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .

What am I that I am called upon to have prejudices concerning the universe?

For all men have but a little while to live and none knows his fate thereafter. So that a man possesses nothing certainly save a brief loan of his body: and yet the body of man is capable of much curious pleasure.

The realization that life is absurdand cannot be an end, but only abeginning. This is a truth nearly allgreat minds have taken as their starting point.

People marry through a variety of other reasons, and with varying results: but to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.

I fight against the gluttony of time with so many very amusing weapons with gestures and with three attitudes and with charming phrases; with tears and with tinsel, and with sugar-coated pills, and with platitudes slightly regilded. Yes, and I fight him also with little mirrors wherein gleam confusedly the corruptions of lust, and ruddy loyalty, and a bit of moonshine, and the pure diamond of the heart's desire, and the opal cloudings of human compromise: but, above all, I fight that ravening dotard with the strength of my own folly.

I am Manuel. I have lived in the loneliness which is common to all men, but the difference is that I have known it. Now it is necessary for me, as it is necessary for all men, to die in this same loneliness, and I know that there is no help for it.