Jack Vance Quotes
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Dismount and kneel before me, that I may strike off your head with fullest ease. You shall die in this tragic golden light of sunset.
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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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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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'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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Until work has reached its previous stage nympharium privileges are denied to all.
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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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The history of man is a compendium of such evil. We are an evolutionary product, descendants of predators. A few synthetic foods aside, every morsel eaten by man is taken from another living thing. We are intended for murder; we kill to exist!
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'When one deals with the Murthe, the unthinkable becomes the ordinary, and Zanzel's repute carries no more weight than last year's mouse-dropping - if that much.'
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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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'I'm sure you didn’t mean to hurt anyone.'Madoc Roswyn laughed a soft forlorn laugh. 'The sad truth is that I didn’t care-which may be worse.'
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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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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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'All is mutability, and thus your three hundred terces has fluctuated to three.'
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He was neither lazy nor incompetent; he merely had occupational claustrophobia.
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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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I still feel that we should act with restraint. It’s much easier not to do than to undo.
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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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'Here you see the pattern from which my great work is derived. It expresses the symbolic significance of NULLITY to which TOTALITY must necessarily attach itself, by Kratinjae's Second Law of Cryptorrhoid Affinities, with which you are possibly familiar.' <br.> 'Not in every aspect,' said Cugel.
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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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A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.
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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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Dango, Pume, Thwither: down with Visbhume’s breeches; let him hold his backside at the ready.
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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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Die then. This is my cure for sore knees.