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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.

James Branch Cabell

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James Branch Cabell
Age: 79 †
Born: 1879
Born: April 14
Died: 1958
Died: May 5
Author
Autobiographer
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Richmond
Virginia
Turns
Observe
Able
Wit
Indecency
Everything
Manners
Diction
Nothing
Criticism
Classify
Must
Creation
Conceal
Men
Fashion
Morals
Turn
Begun
Moral
Elegant

More quotes by James Branch Cabell

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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.
James Branch Cabell
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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
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Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.
James Branch Cabell
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No lady is ever a gentleman.
James Branch Cabell
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A manpossessesnothing certainlysavea brief loanof his own body.
James Branch Cabell
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I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.
James Branch Cabell
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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.
James Branch Cabell
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No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.
James Branch Cabell
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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.
James Branch Cabell
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Life is very marvelous... and to the wonders of the earth there is no end appointed.
James Branch Cabell
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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.
James Branch Cabell
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The optimist sees a light at the end of the tunnel, the realist sees a train entering the tunnel, the pessimist sees a train speeding at him, hell for leather, and the machinist sees three idiots sitting on the rail track. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cabell
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People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.
James Branch Cabell
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Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong
James Branch Cabell
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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.
James Branch Cabell
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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
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There are many of our so-called captains on industry who, if the truth were told, and a shorter and uglier word were not unpermissible, are little better than malefactors of great wealth.
James Branch Cabell
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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.
James Branch Cabell
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In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.
James Branch Cabell
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Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?
James Branch Cabell