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For All Men Have But A Little While To Live And None Knows His Fate Thereafter. So That A Man Possesses Nothing Certainly Save A Brief Loan Of His Body: And Yet The Body Of Man Is Capable Of Much Curious Pleasure.

-James Branch Cabell

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For All Men Have

James Branch Cabell

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For All Men Have But A Little While To Live And None Knows His Fate Thereafter. So That A Man Possesses Nothing Certainly Save A Brief Loan Of His Body: And Yet The Body Of Man Is Capable Of Much Curious Pleasure.

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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.

Man Alone Of Animals Plays The Ape To His Dreams .

I Have Followed After The Truth, Across This Windy Planet Upon Which Every Person Is Nourished By One Or Another Lie.

The Only Way Of Rendering Life Endurable Is To Drink As Much Wine As One Can Come By.

Here Was The Astounding Fact: The Race Did Go Forward; The Race Did Achieve; And In Every Way The Race Grew Better. Progress Through Irrational And Astounding Blunders, Whose Outrageousness Bedwarfed The Wildest Cliches Of Romance, Was What Kennaston Found Everywhere. All This, Then, Also Was Foreplanned, Just As All Happenings At Storisende Had Been, In His Puny Romance; And The Puppets, Here To, Moved As They Thought Of Their Own Volition, But Really In Order To Serve A Denouement In Which Many Of Them Had Not Any Personal Part Or Interest...

For All Men Have But A Little While To Live And None Knows His Fate Thereafter. So That A Man Possesses Nothing Certainly Save A Brief Loan Of His Body: And Yet The Body Of Man Is Capable Of Much Curious Pleasure.

No Lady Is Ever A Gentleman.

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.

Oh, Do The Overlords Of Life And Death Always Provide Some Obstacle To Prevent What All Of Us Have Known In Youth Was Possible From Ever Coming True?

For Although This Was A Very Heroic War, With A Parade Of Every Sort Of High Moral Principle, And With The Most Sonorous Language Employed Upon Both Sides, It Somehow Failed To Bring About Either The Reformation Or The Ruin Of Humankind: And After The Conclusion Of The Murdering And General Breakage, The World Went On Pretty Much As It Has Done After All Other Wars, With A Vague Notion That A Deal Of Time And Effort Had Been Unprofitably Invested, And A Conviction That It Would Be Inglorious To Say So.

What Is Man That His Welfare Be Considered? An Ape Who Chatters Of Kinship With The Archangels While He Very Filthily Digs For Groundnuts. And Yet I Perceive That This Same Man Is A Maimed God. He Is Condemned Under Penalty To Measure Eternity With An Hourglass And Infinity With A Yardstick And What Is More, He Very Nearly Does It.

Everything In Life Is Miraculous. For The Sigil Taught Me That It Rests Within The Power Of Each Of Us To Awaken Atwill From A Dragging Nightmare Of Life Made Up Of Unimportant Tasks And Tedious Useless Little Habits, To See Life As It Really Is, And To Rejoice In Its Exquisite Wonderfulness.

In Religious Matters A Traveller Loses Nothing By Civility.

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.

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

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

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."

People Marry Through A Variety Of Other Reasons, And With Varying Results: But To Marry For Love Is To Invite Inevitable Tragedy.

Trapped Dreams Must Die.

There Is No Escaping, At Times, The Gloomy Suspicion That Fiddling With Pens And Ink Is, After All, No Fit Employment For A Grown Man.

I Am Manuel. I Have Lived In The Loneliness Which Is Common To All Men, But The Difference Is That I Have Known It. Now It Is Necessary For Me, As It Is Necessary For All Men, To Die In This Same Loneliness, And I Know That There Is No Help For It.

Why Is The King Of Hearts The Only One That Hasn't A Moustache?

Whatever Pretended Pessimists In Search Of Notoriety May Say, Most People Are Naturally Kind, At Heart.

Poetry Is Man's Rebellion Against Being What He Is.

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.

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.

Time Changes All Things And Cultivates Even In Herself An Appreciation Of Irony, And, Therefore, Why Shouldn't I Have Changed A Trifle?

Sad Hours And Glad Hours, And All Hours, Pass Over; One Thing Unshaken Stays: Life, That Hath Death For Spouse, Hath Chance For Lover; Whereby Decays, Each Thing Save One Thing: Mid This Strife Diurnal, Of Hourly Change Begot, Love That Is God-born, Bides As God Eternal, And Changes Not; Nor Means A Tinseled Dream Pursuing Lovers, Find Altered By-and-bye, When, With Possession, Time Anon Discovers, Trapped Dreams Must Die, - For He That Visions God, Of Mankind Gathers, One Manlike Trait Alone, And Reverently Imputes To Him A Father's Love For His Son.

But With Man The Case Is Otherwise, In That When Logic Leads To Any Humiliating Conclusion, The Sole Effect Is To Discredit Logic.

The Touch Of Time Does More Than The Club Of Hercules.

Creeds Matter Very Little... The Optimist Proclaims That We Live In The Best Of All Possible Worlds; And The Pessimist Fears This Is True. So I Elect For Neither Label.

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.

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No Person Of Quality Ever Remembers Social Restrictions Save When Considering How Most Piquantly To Break Them.

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I Am Willing To Taste Any Drink Once.

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A Manpossessesnothing Certainlysavea Brief Loanof His Own Body.

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Love, I Take It, Must Look Toward Something Not Quite Accessible, Something Not Quite Understood.

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The Desire To Write Perfectly Of Beautiful Happenings Is, As The Saying Runs, Old As The Hills — And As Immortal.

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