Favorite Cabell Quotations?

"... a man attains to actual contentment only when he is drunk or when he is engaged in occupations not very decorously described."
Figures of Earth (Kalki ed. 101-02)

The second half of this sentence is perhaps not as euphemistic as it at first appears, since the word 'occupy' (as in 'to be inside') was sufficiently a nudge-wink word in Shakespeare's time that the whore Doll Tearsheet complains in 2 Henry IV that "these villains will make the word as odious as the word 'occupy', which was an excellent good word before it was ill sorted". The author of "The Love-Letters of Falstaff" would surely have known this.

"Lord, what a deal of ruined life it takes to make a little art!"
from "Judith's Creed" in The Certain Hour

(... a twist on Alfred de Musset's "It takes a great deal of life to make a little art.")

"Fate, as always frugal of display, used simple tools." Cream of the Jest (1927/218).

NB I'm fairly certain I entered this quote in CK, but would not have thought to annotate the publication year. So if I'm right, a nod of appreciation to whomever of us (and I suspect it would have been one of this group, if anyone) made the effort.

Good one... but should probably be dated 1917. I'll check 1/e to confirm...

I blogged about my favorite Cabell opening lines, this afternoon:

http://www.wirkman.com/Wirkman/Netizen/Entries/2010/3/24_First_impressions_in_fi...

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." "Coth at Porutsa" in The Silver Stallion (1926 / 129) -- from my McBride edition.

I know this is a notorious one, but I like knowing the source. I assume this is a Cabell original? It has become so familiar I'm uncertain whether I read it in Cabell first, or not.

Cabell used it, also, in DOMNEI. Robert Nozick quoted it in PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLANATIONS, without citation to Cabell, as an old joke, I believe.

Ah! It's quite possible I ran across the Nozick first, years ago. And Cabell very well could qualify as the source of "an old joke" for Nozick, whether read in Silver Stallion or Domnei.

"Young Southern writers, no matter how remote their parish, how indifferent their neighbors, have a thousand polestars of every conceivable magnitude and color to guide them. The Southern sky is full of William Gilmore Simms and James Branch Cabell and Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty and even glittering Truman Capote, and look, there's the Thomas Wolfe nebula, huge and diffuse."

- Bill Kauffman, "Back to Batavia"

9> I almost began a new thread: "Cabell Quoted or Referenced by Other Authors in Their Writings" but then saw you'd included the Bill Kauffman quote here, so I think I'll likewise follow suit.

In the "Compiler's Note" that prefaces William T. Vollmann's The Atlas (1996), Vollmann opens with the following statement that includes a JBC quote:

"This book was inspired by Yasunari Kawabata's 'palm-of-the-hand' stories,' which I enjoy reading at bedtime, in the five minutes between lying down and turning off the light. It is equally pleasurable for me to page through a certain great atlas that I have, idling over unknown countries while I wait for my companion of the evening to finish brushing her teeth. The writing of these stories has given me the same desultory joy. As James Branch Cabell remarked, 'Toward no one of those pre-eminent topics of my era do I feel incited to direct an intelligent and broad-minded concern'. What you hold, then, is but a piecemeal atlas of the world I think in."

~ quote from Let Me Lie, Being in the Main an Ethnological Account of the Remarkable Commonwealth of Virginia and the Making of its History (NY: Farrar, Straus, 1947), p. 17.

Great siting.

I've not read Vollman since You Bright & Risen Angels, which I enjoyed. I really should give another of his works a go.

Towards the end of UNMORAL, Jack Woodford's 1934 novel dedicated to his daughter, he quotes Cabell to tidy up a scene.

"The room was in wild disorder. She'd better leave the mercurochrome bottle right where it was, she decided; otherwise the cleaning woman might not understand what the red stuff was and imagine that her employer was no longer a 'good' girl, which was in the cleaning woman's conception, a girl who had about her what Mr. James Branch Cabell had called the 'small odor of virginity.'"

I wrote about Woodford's book on my blog, today: http://wp.me/p2PSTM-bI

Very interesting blogpost, Timo. "Selfyness" -- sounds kinda Stephen Colbertian? (Is it a coincidence that Cabell was a friend of Isabel Paterson, mentor to Rand and Buckley?). It seems as if Cabell makes an 'appearance' in most of Woodford's books -- do we have any record as to what Cabell thought of Woodford? I don't see Woodford indexed in the volumes of Cabell letters nor in the MacDonald biography. Since Cabell was much chagrined to be regarded in many quarters as a smutty writer, I'd be surprised if he relished the adulation of a borderline pornographer (even a savvy one) like Woodford-- though of course Cabell would be the soul of politeness face to face...