Jack Vance Quotes
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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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Until work has reached its previous stage nympharium privileges are denied to all.
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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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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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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 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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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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'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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'All is mutability, and thus your three hundred terces has fluctuated to three.'
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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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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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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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Die then. This is my cure for sore knees.
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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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'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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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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If the past is a house of many chambers, then the present is the most recent coat of paint.
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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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'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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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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He was neither lazy nor incompetent; he merely had occupational claustrophobia.
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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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Aillas groaned. 'Destiny could never be so unkind.'Suldrun said in a soft voice: 'Destiny doesn’t really care.'