# Quote — James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest

> I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will 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. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are.

- Author: [James Branch Cabell](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-branch-cabell.md)
- Book: [The Cream of the Jest](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-branch-cabell/the-cream-of-the-jest.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Branch_Cabell#The_Cream_of_the_Jest_(1917)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-branch-cabell/the-cream-of-the-jest/i-have-been

## More from this book

> 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?

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-branch-cabell/the-cream-of-the-jest/dreaming-a-dream.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-branch-cabell/the-cream-of-the-jest/kennaston-no-longer.md)

> It was not his to choose from what volume or on which page thereof he would read; accident, as it seemed, decided that; but the chance-opened page lay unblurred before him, and he saw it with a clarity denied to other men of his generation.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-branch-cabell/the-cream-of-the-jest/it-was-not.md)