At what cost, now, may one attempt to write perfectly of beautiful happenings?
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"Auctorial Induction"James Branch Cabell
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The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills — and as immortal.
James Branch Cabell
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
If the poets and warriors who make up the list of Mr. Cabell's heroes devote their lives almost wholly to love, it is for the reason that no other emotion interests him so much or seems to him to furnish so many beautiful happenings about which to write perfectly. Love, like art, is a species of creation, and the moods which attend it, though illusions, are miracles none the less. ... In this tale love is canonized: throned on alabaster above all the vulgar gods it diffuses among its worshipers a crystal radiance in which mortal imperfections perish — or are at least forgotten during certain rapturous hours. Ordinarily one cynical touch will break such pretty bubbles; but Mr. Cabell, himself a master of cynical touches and shrewdly anticipant of them, protects his invention with the competent armor of irony...
James Branch Cabell
I can understand deposing the Queen from the throne perfectly well. I can understand an attempt made on the life of the Queen perfectly well, or expelling her from her dominions but I do not, for the life of me, know what it is to depose her ‘from the style, honour, or royal name of the Imperial Crown of the United Kingdom.
Robert Holmes
Accidents and chance are words used by persons who do not think clearly when they attempt to account for certain happenings. Anyone who thinks must be convinced that in a world as orderly as this there is no room for the words accident and chance.
Harold W. Percival
Cabell, James Branch
Cabibbo, Nicola
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