James Branch Cabell
James Branch Cabell
James Branch Cabellwas 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."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth14 April 1879
CountryUnited States of America
I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.
Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?
Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong
The only way of rendering life endurable is to drink as much wine as one can come by.
There is no gift more great than love.
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.
People marry for a variety of reasons and with varying results. But to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.
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.
But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.
The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.
Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?
I take it that I must be the eternal playfellow of time. For piety and common-sense and death are rightfully time's toys; and it is with these three that I divert myself.
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 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.