James Branch Cabell Quotes

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

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

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

No lady is ever a gentleman.

Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?

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.

But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.

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.

People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.

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