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
Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .
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.
Sad hours and glad hours, and all hours, pass over; One thing unshaken stays: Life, that hath Death for spouse, hath Chance for lover; Whereby decays Each thing save one thing: - mid this strife diurnal Of hourly change begot, Love that is God-born, bides as God eternal, And changes not; - Nor means a tinseled dream pursuing lovers Find altered by-and-bye, When, with possession, time anon discovers Trapped dreams must die, - For he that visions God, of mankind gathers One manlike trait alone, And reverently imputes to Him a father's Love for his son.
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.
People must have both their dreams and their dinners in this world, and when we go out of it we must take what we find. That is all.
Trapped dreams must die.
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 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.