Jack Vance Quotes
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Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.
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I have seen all I care to see and heard rather more.
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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 town’s lack of special quirks was almost a peculiarity in itself.
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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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'The crime,' said the Jacynth softly, 'is abstract and fundamental: the innate depravity of extinguishing life.'
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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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Your doctrines are remarkable! As if I existed only to fulfill your cravings! Then, since I do not care to do so, the cosmos must be considered insane.
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Guyal reined his horse and reflected that flowers were rarely cherished by persons of hostile disposition.
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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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'The contingency is remote.' (This is also a Jeeves quote in the PG Wodehouse Novels)
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Your thoughts move with the deft precision of worm-tracks in the mud.
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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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I give dignity second place to expedience.
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If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them.
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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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My fees are not too high. Your wage scale may simply be too low.
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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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'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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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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'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.'