Jurgen Quotes

“Why, it seemed to me I had lost the most of myself; and there was left only a brain which played with ideas, and a body that went delicately down pleasant ways. And I could not believe as my fellows believed, nor could I love them, nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly: for I had lost their cordial common faith of what use they made of half-hours and months and years... I had lost faith in the importance of my own actions, too. There was a little time of which the passing might be made endurable; beyond gaped unpredictable darkness: and that was all there was of certainty anywhere.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen

“…nobody can live longer in peace than his neighbor chooses.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen

“Now but before a fool's opinion of himself," the brown man cried, "the Gods are powerless. Oh, yes, and envious, too!”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“I think there is something in me which will endure. I am fettered by cowardice, I am enfeebled by disastrous memories; and I am maimed by old follies. Still, I seem to detect in myself something which is permanent and rather fine. Underneath everything, and in spite of everything, I really do seem to detect that something. What rôle that something is to enact after the death of my body, and upon what stage, I cannot guess. When fortune knocks I shall open the door.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“I am looking for my wife, whom I suspect to have been carried off by a devil, poor fellow!”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“There is, moreover, a sign by which you may distinguish Thragnar. For if you deny what he says, he will promptly concede you are in the right. This was the curse put upon him by Miramon Lluagor, for a detection and a hindrance.” “By that unhuman trait,” says Jurgen, “ Thragnar ought to be very easy to distinguish.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen

“Hah, all we poets write a deal about love: but none of us may grasp the word's full meaning until he reflects that this is a passion mighty enough to induce a woman to put up with him.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“Well, nobody can live longer in peace than his neighbor chooses. Nevertheless, it is not fair.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“Well, when in Rome," said Jurgen, "one must be romantic.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“Meanwhile I tell you candidly, you brown man, there is something in Jurgen far too admirable for any intelligent arbiter ever to fling into the dustheap. I am, if nothing else, a monstrous clever fellow: and I think I shall endure, somehow. Yes, cap in hand goes through the land, as the saying is, and I believe I can contrive some trick to cheat oblivion when the need arises," says Jurgen, trembling, and gulping, and with his eyes shut tight, but even so, with his mind quite made up about it. "Of course you may be right; and certainly I cannot go so far as to say you are wrong: but still, at the same time—”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“Well, I am afraid, sir," said Jurgen, after a pause, "that you are a person of somewhat degraded ideals." "Ah, but you are young. Youth can afford ideals, being vigorous enough to stand the hard knocks they earn their possessor. But I am an old fellow cursed with a tender heart and tolerably keen eyes.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“Well, love is very pleasant to observe as he advances, overthrowing all ancient memories with laughter. And yet for each gay lover who concedes the lordship of love, and wears intrepidly love's liveries, the end of all is death.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“Azra, it must be recorded, had never any confidence in her son; and was the only woman, Jurgen felt, who really understood him.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“Read me!" was written on the signboard: "read me, and judge if you understand! So you stopped in your journey because I called, scenting something unusual, something droll. Thus, although I am nothing, and even less, there is no one that sees me but lingers here. Stranger, I am a law of the universe. Stranger, render the law what is due the law!”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“I am a monstrous clever fellow.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen

“The religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy.”
― James Cabell Branch, Jurgen

“It amuses me to weep for a dead man with eyes that once were his.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“None the less, I think there is something in me which will endure. I am fettered by cowardice, I am enfeebled by disastrous memories; and I am maimed by old follies. Still, I seem to detect in myself something which is permanent and rather fine.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“My staff is a twig from Yggdrasill, the tree of universal life: Thersitês gave it me, and the sap that throbs therein arises from the Undar fountain, where the grave Norns make laws for men and fix their destinies.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“Well, my pet,” says Jurgen, “the Jews got into Jericho by trying.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“All moves uncomprehendingly, and to the sound of laughter.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen

“I manage affairs as best I can, Jurgen. But they get in a fearful muddle sometimes. Eh, sirs, I have no competent assistants. I have to look out for everything, absolutely everything! And of course, while in a sort of way I am infallible, mistakes will occur every now and then in the actual working out of plans that in the abstract are right enough. So it really does please me to hear anybody putting in a kind word for things as they are, because, between ourselves, there is a deal of dissatisfaction about. And I was honestly delighted, just now, to hear you speaking up for evil in the face of that rapscallion monk. So I give you thanks and many thanks, Jurgen, for your kind word.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“I am not fit to mate with your perfection. At the bottom of my heart, I no longer desire perfection. For we who are tax-payers as well as immortal souls must live by politic evasions and formulae and catchwords that fret away our lives as moths waste a garment; we fall insensibly to common-sense as to a drug; and it dulls and kills whatever in us is rebellious and fine and unreasonable; and so you will find no man of my years with whom living is not a mechanism which gnaws away time unprompted.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“It is as a chessboard whereon the pieces move diversely: the knights leaping sidewise, and the bishops darting obliquely, and the rooks charging straightforward, and the pawns laboriously hobbling from square to square, each at the player's will. There is no discernible order, all to the onlooker is manifestly in confusion: but to the player there is a meaning in the disposition of the pieces." "I do not deny it: still, one must grant—" "And I think it is as though each of the pieces, even the pawns, had a chessboard of his own which moves as he is moved, and whereupon he moves the pieces to suit his will, in the very moment wherein he is moved willy-nilly." "You may be right: yet, even so—”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“And how should I know whether or not I speak the truth?" the God asked of him, "since I am but the illusion of an old woman, as you have so frequently proved by logic.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“Hell stood directly contiguous to Heaven, so that the blessed could augment their felicity by gazing down upon the tortures of the damned.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“she was the victim of circumstances, and had no choice about becoming a vampire, once the cat had jumped over her coffin. Still, Jurgen always felt, in his illogical masculine way, that her vocation was not nice.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“Then, too, he had a sort of prejudice against the way in which Florimel spent her time in seducing and murdering young men.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“The religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy. This contented the devils, and Jurgen had learned long ago never to fall out with either of these codes, without which, as the devils were fond of observing, Hell would not be what it is.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“But can one obtain a divorce here?" "Oh, no," said they. "We trafficked in them for a while, but we found that all persons who obtained divorces through our industry promptly thanked Heaven they were free at last. In the face of such ingratitude we gave over that profitless trade,”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice