Jack Vance Quotes
-
Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning; such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.
-
'If ambush I must, then ambush I will,' Aillas muttered to himself. 'A fig for chivalry, at least until the war is won.'
-
Your thoughts move with the deft precision of worm-tracks in the mud.
-
'The crime,' said the Jacynth softly, 'is abstract and fundamental: the innate depravity of extinguishing life.'
-
His brain ached with the want of knowing.
-
'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.'
-
I suppose if you isolate yourself to such an extent, you more or less must expect a series of emergencies.
-
Damned meddlers. It’s hard to know when their curiosity is official and when it’s just curiosity.
-
'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.'
-
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...
-
The life we’ve been leading couldn’t last forever. It’s a wonder it lasted as long as it did.
-
My fees are not too high. Your wage scale may simply be too low.
-
'The contingency is remote.' (This is also a Jeeves quote in the PG Wodehouse Novels)
-
I fear, Master Zamp, that you are a victim to your own perfervid imagination.
-
Music is like a language: you cannot understand it unless you learn it, or more accurately, are born into it.
-
'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.'
-
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.
-
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.
-
If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them.
-
A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain....The solution is not splicing the rope; it’s lessening the tension.
-
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.
-
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.'
-
Sir, your ideas are incorrect in every possible respect.
-
'Navigation on this lake is forbidden to aliens,' he declared. 'We are ordered to sink all intruding vessels. Prepare to drown.'