Jack Vance Quotes
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'Enter, my friend, enter. How goes your trade?''In all candor, not too well,' said Cugel. 'I am both perplexed and disappointed, for my talismans are not obviously useless.'
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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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Ildefonse said ponderously: 'If your analysis is correct, we must undertake to secure the future against this pangynic nightmare.'
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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 crime,' said the Jacynth softly, 'is abstract and fundamental: the innate depravity of extinguishing life.'
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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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I have seen all I care to see and heard rather more.
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'The contingency is remote.' (This is also a Jeeves quote in the PG Wodehouse Novels)
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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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Music is like a language: you cannot understand it unless you learn it, or more accurately, are born into it.
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Your thoughts move with the deft precision of worm-tracks in the mud.
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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 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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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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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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You have frightened and daunted me. I will stop stealing at once.
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I fear, Master Zamp, that you are a victim to your own perfervid imagination.
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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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If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them.
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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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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.
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My fees are not too high. Your wage scale may simply be too low.