James Branch Cabell
118 quotes
Biography
"Men have begun to observe and classify, they turn from creation to Criticism. ... It is the Fashion to be a wit. ... one must be able to conceal indecency with elegant diction; manners are everything, morals nothing."
"A novel, or indeed any work of art, is not intended to be a literal transcription from Nature. ... Life is a series of false values. There it is always the little things that are greatest. Art attempts to remedy this. It may be defined as an expurgated edition of Nature."
"If we assiduously cultivate our powers of exaggeration, perhaps we, too, shall obtain the Paradise of Liars. And there Raphael shall paint for us scores and scores of his manifestly impossible pictures ... and Shakespeare will lie to us of fabulous islands far past 'the still-vex'd Bermoothes,' and bring us fresh tales from the coast of Bohemia. For no one will speak the truth there, and we shall all be perfectly happy."
"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."
"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."
"Yet this Charteris speaks from a perished world, he babbles of a civilization as dead as Babylon's... [In 1918, for example,] Woodrow Wilson was filling, accurately, the former station of William McKinley and of James K. Polk; and in many quarters was being taken quite as seriously as had been his predecessors during their own personally directed wars for moral principles so consistently elevated that they have never yet sunk into human comprehension."
"A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book "means" thereafter, perforce, — both grammatically and actually, — whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it."
"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."
"The Terrible and Marvellous History of Manuel Pig-Tender That Afterwards Was Named Manuel the Redeemer."
"For this is the song of the double-soul, distortedly two in one, — <br/> Of the wearied eyes that still behold the fruit ere the seed be sown, <br/> And derive affright for the nearing night from the light of the noontide sun. <br/> For one that with hope in the morning set forth, and knew never a fear, <br/> They have linked with another whom omens bother; and he whispers in one's ear. <br/> And one is fain to be climbing where only angels have trod, <br/> But is fettered and tied to another's side who fears that it might look odd."
"The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills — and as immortal."
"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."
"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."
"Always the fact remains that to the mentally indolent this book may well seem a volume of disconnected short stories. All of us being more or less mentally indolent, this possibility constitutes a dire fault."
"At what cost, now, may one attempt to write perfectly of beautiful happenings?"
"It spurred me to such action as I took, — but it has robbed me of sugared eloquence, it has left me chary of speech. It is necessary that I climb very high because of my love for you, and upon the heights there is silence."
"Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, — and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?"
"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?""
"I have made at worst some neat, precise and joyous little tales which prevaricate tenderly about the universe and veil the pettiness of human nature with screens of verbal jewelwork. It is not the actual world they tell about, but a vastly superior place where the Dream is realized and everything which in youth we knew was possible comes true. It is a world we have all glimpsed, just once, and have not ever entered, and have not ever forgotten. So people like my little tales. ... Do they induce delusions? Oh, well, you must give people what they want, and 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."
"The Dream, as I now know, is not best served by making parodies of it, and it does not greatly matter after all whether a book be an epic or a directory. What really matters is that there is so much faith and love and kindliness which we can share with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly, simple, generous living we approach perfection in the highest and most lovely of all arts. ... But you, I think, have always comprehended this."
"Hey, my masters, lords and brothers, ye that till the fields of rhyme, <br/> Are ye deaf ye will not hearken to the clamor of your time?"
"We are talking over telephones, as Shakespeare could not talk; <br/> We are riding out in motor-cars where Homer had to walk; <br/> And pictures Dante labored on of mediaeval Hell <br/> The nearest cinematograph paints quicker, and as well. But ye copy, copy always; — and ye marvel when ye find <br/> This new beauty, that new meaning, — while a model stands behind,<br/> Waiting, young and fair as ever, till some singer turn and trace <br/> Something of the deathless wonder of life lived in any place. <br/> Hey, my masters, turn from piddling to the turmoil and the strife! <br/> Cease from sonneting, my brothers; let us fashion songs from life."
"American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison.... Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be an unprejudiced judge. The tale seems to me one of those many books which have profited, very dubiously indeed, by having obtained, in one way of another, the repute of being indecent."
"Before 1914 had well begun to make the world safe for hypocrisy, these stories had blended into one continuous and fairly long Comedy of Evasion, called then In the Flesh, but a little later rechristened The Cream of The Jest..."