Jack Vance Quotes
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Claghorn had long insisted that no human condition endured forever, with the corollary that the more complicated such a condition, the greater its susceptibility to change.
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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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'All is mutability, and thus your three hundred terces has fluctuated to three.'
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Excellent; all is well. The 'everlasting tedium' exactly countervenes the 'immediate onset of death' and I am left only with the 'canker' which, in the person of Firx, already afflicts me. One must use his wits in dealing with maledictions.
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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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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 not called Cugel the Clever for nothing.
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I must cite an intrinsic condition of the universe. We set forth in any direction which seems convenient; each leads to the same place: the end of the universe.
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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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And, stretching in languid warmth, she contrived to twist her body into first one luxurious position, then another.
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Of all questions, why? is the least pertinent. It begs the question; it assumes the larger part of its own response; to wit, that a sensible response exists.
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Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.
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If one basic axiom controls the cosmos, it must be this: In a situation of infinity every possible condition occurs, not once, but an infinite number of times.
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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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Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.
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'Truth' is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.
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'Let him talk as he will!' scoffed Zamp. 'His motives are not at all obscure.'
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I'm only giving orders because I'm more efficient and smarter than you are.
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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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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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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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If the past is a house of many chambers, then the present is the most recent coat of paint.
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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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Die then. This is my cure for sore knees.