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

> With the passage of time, whatever a man had done, whether for good or evil, with the man's bodily organs, left the man's parish unaffected: only a man's thoughts and dreams could outlive him, in any serious sense, and these might survive with perhaps augmenting influence: so that Kennaston had come to think artistic creation in words — since marble and canvas inevitably perished — was the one, possibly, worth-while employment of human life. But here was a crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston this seemed the one real tragedy that could be staged on earth....

- 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/with-the-passage

## 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)