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

> The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their love-affairs, their maxims, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. 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. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradox — that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word.

- 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/the-purblind-majority

## 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)