Quotes by James Branch Cabell

Koshchei was omnipotent, as men estimate omnipotence: but by what course of reasoning had people come to believe that Koshchei was clever, as men estimate cleverness? The fact that, to the contrary, Koshchei seemed well-meaning, but rather slow of apprehension and a little needlessly fussy, went far toward explaining a host of matters which had long puzzled Jurgen. Cleverness was, of course, the most admirable of all traits: but cleverness was not at the top of things, and never had been. "Very well, then!" says Jurgen, with a shrug; "let us come to my third request and to the third thing that I have been seeking. Here, though, you ought to be more communicative. For I have been thinking, Prince, my wife's society is perhaps becoming to you a trifle burdensome." "Eh, sirs, I am not unaccustomed to women. I may truthfully say that as I find them, so do I take them. And I was willing to oblige a fellow rebel." "But I do not know, Prince, that I have ever rebelled. Far from it, I have everywhere conformed with custom." "Your lips conformed, but all the while your mind made verses, Jurgen. And poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is." "--And besides, you call me a fellow rebel. Now, how can it be possible that Koshchei, who made all things as they are, should be a rebel? unless, indeed, there is some power above even Koshchei. I would very much like to have that explained to me, sir." "No doubt: but then why should I explain it to you, Jurgen?" says the black gentleman. "Well, be that as it may, Prince! But--to return a little--I do not know that you have obliged me in carrying off my wife. I mean, of course, my first wife." "Why, Jurgen," says the black gentleman, in high astonishment, "do you mean to tell me that you want the plague of your life back again!" "I do not know about that either, sir. She was certainly very hard to live with. On the other hand, I had become used to having her about. I rather miss her, now that I am again an elderly person. Indeed, I believe I have missed Lisa all along." The black gentleman meditated. "Come, friend," he says, at last. "You were a poet of some merit.

Could I but get into words the odor and the thick softness of this girl's hair as my hands, that are a-quiver in every nerve of them, caress her hair; and get into enduring words the glitter and the cloudy shadowings of her hair in this be-drenching moonlight! For I shall forget all this beauty, or at best I shall remember this moment very dimly." "You have done very wrong--" says Dorothy. Says Jurgen, to himself: "Already the moment passes this miserably happy moment wherein once more life shudders and stands heart-stricken at the height of bliss! it passes, and I know even as I lift this girl's soft face to mine, and mark what faith and submissiveness and expectancy is in her face, that whatever the future holds for us, and whatever of happiness we two may know hereafter, we shall find no instant happier than this, which passes from us irretrievably while I am thinking about it, poor fool, in place of rising to the issue." "--And heaven only knows what will become of you Jurgen--" Says Jurgen, still to himself: "Yes, something must remain to me of all this rapture, though it be only guilt and sorrow: something I mean to wrest from this high moment which was once wasted fruitlessly. Now I am wiser: for I know there is not any memory with less satisfaction in it than the memory of some temptation we resisted. So I will not waste the one real passion I have known, nor leave unfed the one desire which ever caused me for a heart-beat to forget to think about Jurgen's welfare. And thus, whatever happens, I shall not always regret that I did not avail myself of this girl's love before it was taken from me." So Jurgen made such advances as seemed good to him. And he noted, with amusing memories of how much afraid he had once been of shocking his Dorothy's notions of decorum, that she did not repulse him very vigorously. "Here, over a dead body! Oh, Jurgen, this is horrible! Now, Jurgen, remember that somebody may come any minute! And I thought I could trust you! Ah, and is this all the respect you have for me!" This much she said in duty. Meanwhile the eyes of Dorothy were dilated and very tender. "Faith, I take no chances, this second time. And so whatever happens, I shall not always regret that which I left undone." Now upon his lips was laughter, and his arms were about the submissive girl.

And so Toveyo will be remembered in this land for a long while.” And Coth answered, rather drearily: “Yes; it is such fools as you and I, Messire Yaotl, who create unnecessary trouble everywhere. Well, I also am now released from my oath! And my master has spoken bitter good sense. The famousness of Manuel is but a dream and a loud jingling of words which happen to sound well together; it is a vanity and a great talking by his old wife and my gray peers: and yet, this nonsense, it may be, will hearten people, and will serve all people always, better than would the truth. And my faith is a foolishness, in that, because of a mere oath,—like your Star Warriors’ Word of the Thingumajigs, sir,—I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.” “Each to his creed,” said Yaotl. “So do men choose between hope and despair.” “Yet creeds mean very little,” Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. “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 merely know that, at the end of all my journeying, there remains for me only to settle down, in my comfortable castles yonder in Poictesme, and to live contentedly with my fine-looking wife Azra and with my son Jurgen,—that innocent dear lad, whom his old hypocrite of a father will by and by, beyond any doubt, be exhorting to imitate a Manuel who never lived! And I know, too, that this is not the ending which I would have chosen for my saga. For I also, I suppose, must now decline into fat ease and high thinking, and I would have preferred the truth.” Coth meditated for a while: he shrugged: and he laughed without hilarity. “Capricious Lord, I pray you, what sort of creatures do men seem to the gods?” “Let us think of more pleasant matters,” Yaotl replied. “For one, I am already thinking of the way in which I can most speedily get you, O insatiable grumbler, again to your far home, and out of my too long afflicted country.” He turned his naked huge back toward Coth, as Coth supposed, to indulge in meditation.

Could I but get into words the odor and the thick softness of this girl's hair as my hands, that are a-quiver in every nerve of them, caress her hair; and get into enduring words the glitter and the cloudy shadowings of her hair in this be-drenching moonlight! For I shall forget all this beauty, or at best I shall remember this moment very dimly." "You have done very wrong--" says Dorothy. Says Jurgen, to himself: "Already the moment passes this miserably happy moment wherein once more life shudders and stands heart-stricken at the height of bliss! it passes, and I know even as I lift this girl's soft face to mine, and mark what faith and submissiveness and expectancy is in her face, that whatever the future holds for us, and whatever of happiness we two may know hereafter, we shall find no instant happier than this, which passes from us irretrievably while I am thinking about it, poor fool, in place of rising to the issue." "--And heaven only knows what will become of you Jurgen--" Says Jurgen, still to himself: "Yes, something must remain to me of all this rapture, though it be only guilt and sorrow: something I mean to wrest from this high moment which was once wasted fruitlessly. Now I am wiser: for I know there is not any memory with less satisfaction in it than the memory of some temptation we resisted. So I will not waste the one real passion I have known, nor leave unfed the one desire which ever caused me for a heart-beat to forget to think about Jurgen's welfare. And thus, whatever happens, I shall not always regret that I did not avail myself of this girl's love before it was taken from me." So Jurgen made such advances as seemed good to him. And he noted, with amusing memories of how much afraid he had once been of shocking his Dorothy's notions of decorum, that she did not repulse him very vigorously. "Here, over a dead body! Oh, Jurgen, this is horrible! Now, Jurgen, remember that somebody may come any minute! And I thought I could trust you! Ah, and is this all the respect you have for me!" This much she said in duty. Meanwhile the eyes of Dorothy were dilated and very tender. "Faith, I take no chances, this second time. And so whatever happens, I shall not always regret that which I left undone." Now upon his lips was laughter, and his arms were about the submissive girl.

I never could abide the hag, but she has such a--There! I've made a big blot right in the middle of 'darling,' and spoiled a perfectly good sheet of paper!... You'd better mail it at once, though, because the evening-paper may have something in it about her lecture." XI Rudolph--" "Why--er--yes, dear?" This was after supper, and Patricia was playing solitaire. Her husband was reading the paper. "Agatha told me all about Virginia, you know--" Here Colonel Musgrave frowned. "It is not a pleasant topic." "You jay-bird, you behave entirely too much as if you were my grandfather. As I was saying, Agatha told me all about your uncle and Virginia," Patricia hurried on. "And how she ran away afterwards, and hid in the woods for three days, and came to your father's plantation, and how your father bought her, and how her son was born, and how her son was lynched--" "Now, really, Patricia! Surely there are other matters which may be more profitably discussed." "Of course. Now, for instance, why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?" Patricia peeped to see what cards lay beneath that monarch, and upon reflection moved the King of Spades into the vacant space. She was a devotee of solitaire and invariably cheated at it. She went on, absently: "But don't you see? That colored boy was your own first cousin, and he was killed for doing exactly what his father had done. Only they sent the father to the Senate and gave him columns of flubdub and laid him out in state when he died--and they poured kerosene upon the son and burned him alive. And I believe Virginia thinks that wasn't fair." "What do you mean?" "I honestly believe Virginia hates the Musgraves. She is only a negro, of course, but then she was a mother once--Oh, yes! all I need is a black eight--" Patricia demanded, "Now look at your brother Hector--the awfully dissipated one that died of an overdose of opiates. When it happened wasn't Virginia taking care of him?" "Of course. She is an invaluable nurse." "And nobody else was here when Agatha went out into the rain.

And here, with no companion save his queer shadow, and with Æsred arched above and bleakly regarding him, Jurgen spent most of his time, rather agreeably, in investigating and meditating upon the more curious of these recreations. The painted Asan were, in all conscience, food for wonder: but over and above these dozen surprising pastimes, the books of Anaïtis revealed to Jurgen, without disguise or reticence, every other far-fetched frolic of heathenry. Hitherto unheard-of forms of diversion were unveiled to him, and every recreation which ingenuity had been able to contrive, for the gratifying of the most subtle and the most strong-stomached tastes. No possible sort of amusement would seem to have been omitted, in running the quaint gamut of refinements upon nature which Anaïtis and her cousins had at odd moments invented, to satiate their desire for some more suave or more strange or more sanguinary pleasure. Yet the deeper Jurgen investigated, and the longer he meditated, the more certain it seemed to him that all such employment was a peculiarly unimaginative pursuit of happiness. "I am willing to taste any drink once. So I must give diversion a fair trial. But I am afraid these are the games of mental childhood. Well, that reminds me I promised the children to play with them for a while before supper." So he came out, and presently, brave in the shirt of Nessus, and mimicked in every action by that incongruous shadow, Prince Jurgen was playing tag with the three little Eumenidês, the daughters of Anaïtis by her former marriage with Acheron, the King of Midnight. Anaïtis and the dark potentate had parted by mutual consent. "Acheron meant well," she would say, with a forgiving sigh, "and that in the Moon's absence he occasionally diverted travellers, I do not deny. But he did not understand me." And Jurgen agreed that this tragedy sometimes befell even the irreproachably diverting. The three Eumenidês at this period were half-grown girls, whom their mother was carefully tutoring to drive guilty persons mad by the stings of conscience: and very quaint it was to see the young Furies at practise in the schoolroom, black-robed, and waving lighted torches, and crowned each with her garland of pet serpents.