Jack Vance Quotes
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You are a particularly clever girl: almost as clever as you are appealing to the eye.
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The mind was a marvellous instrument, thought Shimrod; when left to wander untended, it often arrived at curious destinations.
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If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind.
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Notice this rent in my garment; I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.
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He must approach the subject critically, alert for contradictions, pedantry and vagueness.
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I fear, Master Zamp, that you are a victim to your own perfervid imagination.
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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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Music is like a language: you cannot understand it unless you learn it, or more accurately, are born into it.
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Guyal reined his horse and reflected that flowers were rarely cherished by persons of hostile disposition.
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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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'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 crime,' said the Jacynth softly, 'is abstract and fundamental: the innate depravity of extinguishing life.'
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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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I give dignity second place to expedience.
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'I would define ‘avarice’ as a consequence of the human estate: a condition arising from turbulence and inequality. In none of the paradises, where conditions are no doubt optimum, does ‘avarice’ exert force. Here, we are men struggling toward perfection and ‘avarice’ is a station along the way.'
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Who is seducing whom? If we are working to the same ends, there is no need for so many cross-purposes.
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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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Sir, your ideas are incorrect in every possible respect.
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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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Your thoughts move with the deft precision of worm-tracks in the mud.
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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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You have frightened and daunted me. I will stop stealing at once.
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My fees are not too high. Your wage scale may simply be too low.
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If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them.