American author (1879-1958)
Love, I take it, must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Cream of the Jest
Good and evil keep very exact accounts ... and the face of every man is their ledger.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Jurgen
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.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Certain Hour
Hey, my masters, lords and brothers, ye that till the fields of rhyme,
Are ye deaf ye will not hearken to the clamor of your time?
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Certain Hour
I can but entreat you to remember it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Cream of the Jest
I would like this life which moves and yearns in me, to be able itself to attain to comeliness, though but in transitory performance. The life of a butterfly, for example, is just a graceful gesture: and yet, in that its loveliness is complete and perfectly rounded in itself, I envy this bright flicker through existence. And the nearest I can come to my ideal is punctiliously to pay my bills, be polite to my wife, and contribute to deserving charities.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life
Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Cream of the Jest
I shall not ever return to you, my pigs, because, at worst, to die valorously is better than to sleep out one's youth in the sun.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Figures of Earth
Criticism, whatever may be its pretensions, never does more than to define the impression which is made upon it at a certain moment by a work wherein the writer himself noted the impression of the world which he received at a certain hour.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Certain Hour
The religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Jurgen
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.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Way of Ecben
I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life
That moving carcass does but very inadequately symbolizes you ... a subtle and immortal spirit.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life
Well, love is very pleasant to observe as he advances, overthrowing all ancient memories with laughter. And yet for each gay lover who concedes the lordship of love, and wears intrepidly love's liveries, the end of all is death.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Jurgen
The only way of rendering life endurable is to drink as much wine as one can come by.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life
To submit is the great lesson. I too was once a dreamer: and in dreams there are lessons. But to submit, without dreaming any more, is the great lesson; to submit, without either understanding or repining, and without demanding of life too much of beauty or of holiness, and without shirking the fact that this universe is under no least bond ever to grant us, upon either side of the grave, our desires.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The High Place
I am not so wonderful but that in the hour of my triumph I am frightened by my own littleness.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Figures of Earth
Well, to my finding human beings do not like one another. Indeed, why should they, being rational creatures?
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life
When you consider that presidents and chief-justices and archbishops and kings and statesmen are human beings like you and me and the laundryman, the thought becomes too horrible for humanity to face.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life
No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life