Jack Vance Quotes
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Sorry, I’m not at home. I have gone out to my world Fancy, and I cannot be reached. Call back in a week, unless your business is urgent, in which case call back in a month.
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We are sufficiently at the mercy of machines, Roger; if our music must necessarily be mechanical, then it is time for us to throw in the sponge, and abandon all hope for the future of humanity.
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Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.
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Your doctrines are remarkable! As if I existed only to fulfill your cravings! Then, since I do not care to do so, the cosmos must be considered insane.
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It had been suggested to her that the flaw lay not in the universe but in herself.
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Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.
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What a strange and unfamiliar world if everyone were treated according to his deserts!
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Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.
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There can be no doubt as to the facts as I have stated them. Orthodoxy derives from this axiomatic foundation, and the two systems are mutually reinforcing: hence each is doubly validated.
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Until work has reached its previous stage nympharium privileges are denied to all.
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It was right and proper to exploit the excellences of the moment, but still, when conditions reached an apex, there was nowhere to go but down.
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Gassoon, for all his lore, subscribed to a common fallacy: he assumed that all those whom he encountered appraised him in the same terms as he did himself.
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Your character, Apollon Zamp, is marred by a certain paltriness of spirit, a diffused universal distrust which I truly deplore.
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'Why not alter the habits of a lifetime and speak with candour?' asked Shimrod. 'Truth, after all, need not be only the tactic of last resort.'
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When you demand the nature of my motives, you reveal the style of your thinking to be callow, captious, superficial, craven, uncertain and impudent.
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These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.
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'A natural scientist, examining a single atom, might well be able to asseverate the structure and history of the entire universe!'Bah!' muttered Hurtiancz. 'By the same token, a sensible man need listen to but a single word in order to recognize the whole for egregious nonsense.'
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Sir, my life, drab and insipid though it may seem to others, is the only life given me to live.
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Speaking our language, you will understand us-and if you can think as another man thinks, you cannot dislike him.
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I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
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'I learned a great deal,' said Beran. 'And then I lost all heart for further learning.'Palafox’s eyes glinted. 'Education is not achieved through the heart-it is a systematization of the mental processes.''But I am something other than a mental process,' said Beran. 'I am a man. I must reckon with the whole of myself.'
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Die then. This is my cure for sore knees.
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I have transcended that phase in my intellectual growth where I discover humour in simple freakishness. What exists is real; therefore it is tragic, since wherever lives must die. Only fantasy, the vapours rising from sheer nonsense, can now excite my laughter.
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'You’re sure you want to look into these cognates? You might see things you wouldn’t like.''So long as I know the truth, I don’t care whether I like it or not.'