Jack Vance Quotes
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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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He must approach the subject critically, alert for contradictions, pedantry and vagueness.
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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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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 have seen all I care to see and heard rather more.
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You are a particularly clever girl: almost as clever as you are appealing to the eye.
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Guyal reined his horse and reflected that flowers were rarely cherished by persons of hostile disposition.
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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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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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I fear, Master Zamp, that you are a victim to your own perfervid imagination.
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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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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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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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'The crime,' said the Jacynth softly, 'is abstract and fundamental: the innate depravity of extinguishing life.'
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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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'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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I give dignity second place to expedience.
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You have frightened and daunted me. I will stop stealing at once.
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Your thoughts move with the deft precision of worm-tracks in the mud.
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My fees are not too high. Your wage scale may simply be too low.
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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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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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'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.'