"There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted"
About this Quote
Cabell’s line turns the usual moral victory lap into a hangover. We’re trained to treat resisted temptation as character-building, proof of grit, a little halo-polishing moment. He punctures that piety with a novelist’s suspicion: the cleanest choices often make for the least nourishing memories. What lingers, he implies, isn’t the proud abstinence but the alternate life you briefly touched and then forfeited.
The syntax does quiet damage. “Not any” is a hard zero, an absolutist swipe that refuses to grant even a small, respectable pleasure to virtue. “With less satisfaction” is equally sharp: it doesn’t claim resistance is wrong, only that it’s emotionally stingy. Satisfaction belongs to appetite, to story, to the messy sense that something actually happened. Resisting temptation is an event that cancels itself. You walk away intact, but also unchanged, and the memory can’t pay you back with much narrative interest.
Cabell wrote in a period when American respectability was busy legislating desire into secrecy - the same cultural weather that produced Prohibition and a thriving market for hypocrisy. His work often toys with romance, fantasy, and the self’s private bargains. In that context, the quote reads like a diagnosis of genteel self-denial: it manufactures “good people” who are haunted less by sin than by missed intensity.
The subtext isn’t “give in.” It’s “be honest about the psychic cost of always being good.” Virtue may keep your record clean; it rarely keeps your memory warm.
The syntax does quiet damage. “Not any” is a hard zero, an absolutist swipe that refuses to grant even a small, respectable pleasure to virtue. “With less satisfaction” is equally sharp: it doesn’t claim resistance is wrong, only that it’s emotionally stingy. Satisfaction belongs to appetite, to story, to the messy sense that something actually happened. Resisting temptation is an event that cancels itself. You walk away intact, but also unchanged, and the memory can’t pay you back with much narrative interest.
Cabell wrote in a period when American respectability was busy legislating desire into secrecy - the same cultural weather that produced Prohibition and a thriving market for hypocrisy. His work often toys with romance, fantasy, and the self’s private bargains. In that context, the quote reads like a diagnosis of genteel self-denial: it manufactures “good people” who are haunted less by sin than by missed intensity.
The subtext isn’t “give in.” It’s “be honest about the psychic cost of always being good.” Virtue may keep your record clean; it rarely keeps your memory warm.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Discipline |
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