Quotes from James Branch Cabell

The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.

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.

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams.

Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?

Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.

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.

Life is very marvelous ... and to the wonders of the earth there is no end appointed.

I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.

In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.

There is no gift more great than love.

I am content. While my shrewd fellows rode about the world to seek and to attain power and wisdom, I have elected, as and unpractical realist, to follow after beauty.

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.

The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills and as immortal.

They tell me that truth lies somewhere at the bottom of a well, and at virtually the door of our home is a most notable if long dried well. Our location is thus quite favorable, if we but keep patience.

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

Patriotism is the religion of hell.

I am willing to taste any drink once.

Now but before a fool's opinion of himself," the brown man cried, "the Gods are powerless. Oh, yes, and envious, too!

Well, nobody can live longer in peace than his neighbor chooses. Nevertheless, it is not fair.

Azra, it must be recorded, had never any confidence in her son; and was the only woman, Jurgen felt, who really understood him.

So they fought. Now Jurgen was a very acceptable swordsman, but from the start he found in Heitman Michael his master. Jurgen had never reckoned upon that, and he considered it annoying. If Heitman Michael perforated Jurgen the future would be altered, certainly, but not quite as Jurgen had decided it ought to be remodeled. So this unlooked-for complication seemed preposterous, and Jurgen began to be irritated by the suspicion that he was getting himself killed for nothing at all.

The present supply of realism is nothing but the publisher's answer to a cheap and fickle demand...if realism be a form of art, the newspaper is a permanent contribution to literature.

Well, my pet," says Jurgen, "the Jews got into Jericho by trying.

Yet I am content. For I have served that dream which I elected to be serving. It may be that no man is royal, and that no god is divine, and that our mothers and our wives have not any part in holiness. Oh, yes, it very well may be that I have lost honor and applause, and that I take destruction, through following after a dream which has in it no truth. Yet my dream was noble; and its nobility contents me.