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
People marry for a variety of reasons and with varying results. But to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.
A man of genuine literary genius, since he possesses a temperament whose susceptibilities are of wider area than those of any other, is inevitably of all people the one most variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he, in consequence, who of all people most faithfully and compactly exhibits the impress of his times and his times' tendencies, not merely in his writings where it conceivably might be just predetermined affectation but in his personality.
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.
Whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at heart.
People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.
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.