Jack Vance Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

The person who, let us say, expects generosity from a bank, efficient flexibility from a government agency, open-mindedness from a religious institution will be disappointed. In each purview the notions represent immorality. The poor fool might as quickly discover love among the mantises.

Jack Vance
This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity.

Jack Vance
Of all questions, why? is the least pertinent. It begs the question; it assumes the larger part of its own response; to wit, that a sensible response exists.

Jack Vance
Claghorn had long insisted that no human condition endured forever, with the corollary that the more complicated such a condition, the greater its susceptibility to change.

Jack Vance
Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.

Jack Vance
Aillas replied that while King Audry cited several points of technical interest, and used the resources of abstract logic in an adroit manner, he had actually made no connection with reality.

Jack Vance
Down we go, said Paddy. Now pray to Saint Anthony if you be a good Catholic—
I'm not, snapped Fay, and if you'll give more mind to the boat and less to religion we'll gain by it.

Jack Vance
The mind was a marvellous instrument, thought Shimrod; when left to wander untended, it often arrived at curious destinations.

Jack Vance
They call me a renegade.
The epithet is inaccurate and undeserved. I cannot be faithless to a cause which I never have endorsed. Indeed, I am absolutely faithful to the only cause I espouse, which is my own welfare. I take pride in this unswerving loyalty!

Jack Vance
"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."

Jack Vance
Beauty is a luster which love bestows to guile the eye. Therefore it may be said that only when the brain is without love will the eye look and see no beauty.

Jack Vance
You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.

Jack Vance
Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.

Jack Vance
What is an evil man? The man is evil who coerces obedience to his private ends, destroys beauty, produces pain, extinguishes life.

Jack Vance
Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.

Jack Vance
The universe is eight billion years old, the last two billion of which have produced intelligent life. During this time not one hour of absolute equity has prevailed.

Jack Vance
Guyal reined his horse and reflected that flowers were rarely cherished by persons of hostile disposition.

Jack Vance
We are sufficiently at the mercy of machines, Roger; if our music must necessarily be mechanical, then it is time for us to throw in the sponge, and abandon all hope for the future of humanity.

Jack Vance
Dismount and kneel before me, that I may strike off your head with fullest ease. You shall die in this tragic golden light of sunset.

Jack Vance
You are a particularly clever girl: almost as clever as you are appealing to the eye.

Jack Vance
I do not care to listen; obloquy injures my self-esteem and I am skeptical of praise.

Jack Vance
I understand the gist of your speculation,' said Rhialto. 'It is most likely nuncupatory.

Jack Vance
Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience. Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox—finally irregulationary.

Jack Vance
Enough of this intolerable inanity! I propose that such loquacity passes beyond the scope of the nuisance and over the verge of turpitude.

Jack Vance
He adjudicated the case in a manner I still find perplexing, but which must have been equitable, since it pleased no one.

Jack Vance
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...

Jack Vance
What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace and egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this world of men.

Jack Vance
Roger tried to find out all about her: he wanted, in one brief hour, to make up for a lifetime of non-acquaintance, a lifetime for all practical purposes wasted.

Jack Vance
You must save yourselves, Rogol Domedonfors told them. You have ignored the ancient wisdom, you have been too indolent to learn, you have sought easy complacence from religion, rather than facing manfully to the world.

Jack Vance
Damned meddlers. It's hard to know when their curiosity is official and when it's just curiosity.

Jack Vance