American author (1879-1958)
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Silver Stallion
The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Way of Ecben
One must be able to conceal indecency with elegant diction; manners are everything, morals nothing.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
"The Comedies of William Congreve", William and Mary College Monthly, September 1897
So we pass as a cloud of gnats, where I want to live and be thought of, if only by myself, as a distinguishable entity. And such distinction is impossible in the long progress of the suns, whereby in thought to separate the personality of any one man from all others that have lived, becomes a task to stagger Omniscience.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life
You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Cream of the Jest
A man possesses nothing certainly save a brief loan of his own body: and yet the body of a man is capable of much curious pleasure.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Jurgen
I want my life, the only life of which I am assured, to have symmetry or, in default of that, at least to acquire some clarity. Surely it is not asking very much to wish that my personal conduct be intelligible to me! Yet it is forbidden to know for what purpose this universe was intended, to what end it was set a-going, or why I am here, or even what I had preferably do while here. It vaguely seems to me that I am expected to perform an allotted task, but as to what it is I have no notion.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life
There is not any memory with less satisfaction in it than the memory of some temptation we resisted.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Jurgen
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.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Figures of Earth
Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken 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.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Cream of the Jest
For man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. That a dog dreams vehemently is matter of public knowledge: it is perfectly possible that in his more ecstatic visions he usurps the shape of his master, and visits Elysian pantries in human form: with awakening, he observes that in point of fact he is a dog, and as a rational animal, makes the best of canineship. But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life
The cornerstone of Chivalry I take to be the idea of vicarship: for the chivalrous person is, in his own eyes at least, the child of God, and goes about this world as his Father's representative in an alien country. It was very adroitly to human pride, through an assumption of man's personal responsibility in his tiniest action, that Chivalry made its appeal; and exhorted every man to keep faith, not merely with the arbitrary will of a strong god, but with himself. There is no cause for wonder that the appeal was irresistible, when to each man it thus admitted that he himself was the one thing seriously to be considered.... So man became a chivalrous animal; and about this flattering notion of divine vicarship builded his elaborate medieval code, to which, in essentials, a great number of persons adhere even nowadays.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life
But the course of my life, when I look back, is as orderless as a trickle of water that is diverted and guided by every pebble and crevice and grass-root it encounters. I seem to have done nothing with pre-meditation, but rather, to have had things done to me. And for all the rest of my life, as I know now, I shall have to shave every morning in order to be ready for no more than this!
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Jurgen
If we assiduously cultivate our powers of exaggeration, perhaps we, too, shall obtain the Paradise of Liars.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
"On Telling the Truth", William and Mary College Monthly, November 1897
The comedy is always the same. In the first act the hero imagines a place where happiness exists. In the second he strives towards that goal. In the third he comes up short or what amounts to the same thing he achieves his goal only to find that happiness lies a little further down the road.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The High Place
Hah, all we poets write a deal about love: but none of us may grasp the word's full meaning until he reflects that this is a passion mighty enough to induce a woman to put up with him.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Jurgen
Literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Certain Hour
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.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Beyond Life
I fight against the gluttony of time with so many very amusing weapons -- with gestures and with three attitudes and with charming phrases; with tears and with tinsel, and with sugar-coated pills, and with platitudes slightly regilded. Yes, and I fight him also with little mirrors wherein gleam confusedly the corruptions of lust, and ruddy loyalty, and a bit of moonshine, and the pure diamond of the heart's desire, and the opal cloudings of human compromise: but, above all, I fight that ravening dotard with the strength of my own folly.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Way of Ecben