Jack Vance Quotes
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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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'The crime,' said the Jacynth softly, 'is abstract and fundamental: the innate depravity of extinguishing life.'
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'My clever baton holds your unnatural sorcery in abeyance.'
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I fear, Master Zamp, that you are a victim to your own perfervid imagination.
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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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Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning; such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.
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And I understand they are, in a sense, artists? That is to say, they understand the creative process, the sublimation of fact to symbol and the use of symbol to suggest emotion?
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My fees are not too high. Your wage scale may simply be too low.
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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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Damned meddlers. It’s hard to know when their curiosity is official and when it’s just curiosity.
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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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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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His brain ached with the want of knowing.
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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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'The contingency is remote.' (This is also a Jeeves quote in the PG Wodehouse Novels)
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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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Sir, your ideas are incorrect in every possible respect.
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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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You have frightened and daunted me. I will stop stealing at once.
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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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'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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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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'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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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.'