22 quotes
You must permit that I begin it in my own way, with what may to you at first seem dream-stuff.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Love, I take it, must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at heart.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
I quite fixedly believe the Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, that face on other worlds than ours.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
The transfiguring touch was to come, it seemed from a girl's lips; but it had not; he kissed, and life remained uncharmed.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
All men she must evade at the last and many ar the ways of her elusion.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
James Branch Cabell made this book so that he who wills may read the story of mans eternally unsatisfied hunger in search of beauty.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
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.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
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.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
That was why all art, which strove to make the sensations of a moment soul-satisfying, was dimly felt to be irreligious. For art performed what religion only promised.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
If the Author will it, there may be appended to any comedy an afterpiece. Meanwhile, so far as I may judge, the life of Manuel ends here.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Whatever there is to know,
That shall we know one day.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Here was, perhaps, only another instance of mankind's abhorrence of actualities; and man's quaint dislike of facing reality was here disguised as a high moral principle.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
It is true I have not told you everything. Why should I? No Author ever does....
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Dreaming a dream to prize,
Is wishing ghosts to rise;
And, if I had the spell
To call the buried — well,
Which one would I?
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Kennaston no longer thought of himself as a man of flesh-and-blood moving about a world of his compeers. Or, at least, that especial aspect of his existence was to him no longer a phase of any particular importance.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
I also begin where he began, and follow wither the dream led him. Meanwhile, I can but entreat you to remember it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)