Love Quote by James Branch Cabell

Cabell’s line works like a velvet-gloved slap: it starts with the mild sociological shrug of “a variety of reasons,” then tightens the screws with that chilling absolute, “inevitable tragedy.” The seduction is in the voice. He sounds like a man calmly sorting receipts, not detonating a romantic ideal. That deadpan posture is the trick; it lets the cynicism land as common sense.

The intent isn’t to deny love’s existence so much as to puncture love-as-justification. Marrying for money, status, convenience, duty: those arrangements at least admit their terms. Love, in Cabell’s telling, is the one motive that demands the impossible. It doesn’t merely want companionship; it wants permanence, transcendence, a guarantee that feeling can be converted into a lifelong contract. Tragedy becomes “inevitable” not because love is poisonous, but because love is a moving target and marriage is a fixed architecture. The subtext: when you marry for love, you smuggle an epic narrative into a domestic institution and then blame the institution when the narrative collapses.

Cabell’s context matters. Writing in the early 20th century, he belonged to a wry, disenchanted tradition that distrusted Victorian moral theater and the newer, consumer-friendly cult of romance. His fiction often treats ideals as beautiful frauds we need in order to function. That’s what gives the quote its bite: it’s not puritanical scolding, it’s a modernist diagnosis. Love is magnificent; making it your rationale is the hubris.