List of James Branch Cabell Quotes

In Religious Matters A Traveller Loses Nothing By Civility.

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.

Trapped Dreams Must Die.

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.

Thou Shalt Not Offend Against The Notions Of Thy Neighbor.

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.

I Ask Of Literature Precisely Those Things Of Which I Feel The Lack In My Own Life.

As It Is, Plain Reasoning Assures Me I Am Not Indispensable To The Universe: But With This Reasoning, Somehow, Does Not Travel My Belief.

I Fear You And, Yes, I Love You: And Yet I Cannot Believe. Why Could You Not Let Me Believe, Where So Many Believed? Or Else, Why Could You Not Let Me Deride, As The Remainder Derided So Noisily? O God, Why Could You Not Let Me Have Faith? For You Gave Me No Faith In Anything, Not Even In Nothingness. It Was Not Fair.

Every Notion That Any Man, Dead, Living, Or Unborn, Might Form As To The Universe Will Necessarily Prove Wrong

And One Would Worship A Woman Whom All Perfections Dower, But The Other Smiles At Transparent Wiles; And He Quotes From Schopenhauer . Thus Two By Two We Wrangle And Blunder About The Earth, And That Body We Share We May Not Spare; But The Gods Have Need Of Mirth.

Whatever There Is To Know, That Shall We Know One Day.