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
The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.
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.
In what else, pray, does man differ from the other animals except in that he is used by words?
As it is, plain reasoning assures me I am not indispensable to the universe: but with this reasoning, somehow, does not travel my belief.
Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .
There are many of our so-called captains on industry who, if the truth were told, and a shorter and uglier word were not unpermissible, are little better than malefactors of great wealth.
A manpossessesnothing certainlysavea brief loanof his own body.
Oh, do the Overlords of Life and Death always provide some obstacle to prevent what all of us have known in youth was possible from ever coming true?
Some few there must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothing very insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful happenings.
Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day.
No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.
Literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.
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.
I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful — being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational.