Jack Vance Quotes
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'We are supposed to set you a good example,' said Devonet. 'As a start, I will point out that a lady of refinement would not wish to be found so high in a tree.''Then I am a lady of refinement well and truly,' said Madouc, 'since I did not wish to be found.'
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He adjudicated the case in a manner I still find perplexing, but which must have been equitable, since it pleased no one.
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Ildefonse said ponderously: 'If your analysis is correct, we must undertake to secure the future against this pangynic nightmare.'
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How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real...
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Damned meddlers. It’s hard to know when their curiosity is official and when it’s just curiosity.
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The life we’ve been leading couldn’t last forever. It’s a wonder it lasted as long as it did.
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'At Gundar we conceive 'innocence' as a positive quality, not merely an insipid absence of guilt,' stated the Nolde. 'We are not the fools that certain untidy ruffians might suppose.'
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Music is like a language: you cannot understand it unless you learn it, or more accurately, are born into it.
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I suppose if you isolate yourself to such an extent, you more or less must expect a series of emergencies.
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Your thoughts move with the deft precision of worm-tracks in the mud.
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'The contingency is remote.' (This is also a Jeeves quote in the PG Wodehouse Novels)
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King Aillas talks softly and with great politeness; he has the uncomfortable skill of calling one a false-hearted blackguard, a liar, a cheat and a villain, but making it seem a fulsome compliment.
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'Are you yourself a Christian?'The young man made a negative sign. 'The concepts of religion baffle me.''This inscrutability is perhaps not unintentional,' said the ex-priest. 'It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.'
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I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man’s accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.
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I give dignity second place to expedience.
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My fees are not too high. Your wage scale may simply be too low.
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In measured tones he answered Madouc: 'Your condition lacks dignity; you bring ridicule upon us all.'Madouc gave a stony shrug. 'If you do not like what you see, look elsewhere.'
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Consider the human mind! It is capable of amazing feats when used properly. Conversely, without exercise it atrophies to a lump of gray-yellow fat.
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If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them.
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I fear, Master Zamp, that you are a victim to your own perfervid imagination.
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'Navigation on this lake is forbidden to aliens,' he declared. 'We are ordered to sink all intruding vessels. Prepare to drown.'
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The void is a mouth crying to be filled, a blank mind aching for thought, a cavity desperate for shape. What is not implies what is.
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A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain....The solution is not splicing the rope; it’s lessening the tension.
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Sir, your ideas are incorrect in every possible respect.