Jack Vance Quotes
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'Tell me, then! What is so important?''Your life! I could not bear that you should lose it!''I feel much the same. Say on.'
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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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If the past is a house of many chambers, then the present is the most recent coat of paint.
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Shimrod said: 'Once I thought of you as a child in a woman’s body.'Melancthe smiled a cool smile. 'And now?''The child seems to have wandered away.'
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Dango, Pume, Thwither: down with Visbhume’s breeches; let him hold his backside at the ready.
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Until work has reached its previous stage nympharium privileges are denied to all.
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Die then. This is my cure for sore knees.
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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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Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.
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He said that humanity in the main was crass, stupid, boorish and vulgar, and that I could learn at least this much from you.
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Aillas replied that while King Audry cited several points of technical interest, and used the resources of abstract logic in an adroit manner, he had actually made no connection with reality.
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There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.
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I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.
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He looked around the landscape. Drenched in the golden haze of late afternoon it seemed wonderfully tranquil and beautiful, though permeated with a sense of remoteness and even melancholy, like a scene remembered from one’s youth.
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Aillas groaned. 'Destiny could never be so unkind.'Suldrun said in a soft voice: 'Destiny doesn’t really care.'
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'I am more inclined to punish Hurtiancz for his crassness,' said Ildefonse. 'But now he simulates a swinish stupidity to escape my anger.''Absolute falsity!' roared Hurtiancz. 'I simulate nothing!'Ildefonse shrugged. 'For all his deficiencies as polemicist and magician, Hurtiancz at least is candid.'
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In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.
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He was neither lazy nor incompetent; he merely had occupational claustrophobia.
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Kings, like children, tend to be opportunistic. Generosity only spoils them. They equate affability with weakness and hasten to exploit it.
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A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.
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'Let him talk as he will!' scoffed Zamp. 'His motives are not at all obscure.'
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He used a name for himself, true, but we played at Romance, and this is a game where truth is a bagatelle.
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I gathered that the old fellow suffers from some advanced form of senile dementia, and so perhaps his analysis is not totally accurate.
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These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.