Jack Vance Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

It was right and proper to exploit the excellences of the moment, but still, when conditions reached an apex, there was nowhere to go but down.

Jack Vance
He said that humanity in the main was crass, stupid, boorish and vulgar, and that I could learn at least this much from you.

Jack Vance
Who is seducing whom? If we are working to the same ends, there is no need for so many cross-purposes.

Jack Vance
I have transcended that phase in my intellectual growth where I discover humour in simple freakishness. What exists is real; therefore it is tragic, since wherever lives must die. Only fantasy, the vapours rising from sheer nonsense, can now excite my laughter.

Jack Vance
Dango, Pume, Thwither: down with Visbhume's breeches; let him hold his backside at the ready.

Jack Vance
He looked around the landscape. Drenched in the golden haze of late afternoon it seemed wonderfully tranquil and beautiful, though permeated with a sense of remoteness and even melancholy, like a scene remembered from one's youth.

Jack Vance
Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.

Jack Vance
All is mutability, and thus your three hundred terces has fluctuated to three.

Jack Vance
You have frightened and daunted me. I will stop stealing at once.

Jack Vance
In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.

Jack Vance
"Here you see the pattern from which my great work is derived. It expresses the symbolic significance of NULLITY to which TOTALITY must necessarily attach itself, by Kratinjae's Second Law of Cryptorrhoid Affinities, with which you are possibly familiar." <br.> "Not in every aspect," said Cugel.

Jack Vance
Your character, Apollon Zamp, is marred by a certain paltriness of spirit, a diffused universal distrust which I truly deplore.

Jack Vance
A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain.... The solution is not splicing the rope; it's lessening the tension.

Jack Vance
Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.

Jack Vance
I'm only giving orders because I'm more efficient and smarter than you are.

Jack Vance
Why not alter the habits of a lifetime and speak with candour? asked Shimrod. Truth, after all, need not be only the tactic of last resort.

Jack Vance
It sees that you are wrong, that you are guided by faith indeed.
The Demie fell silent. His face seemed to stiffen.
Are these not facts? asked Joaz. How do you reconcile them with your faith?
The Demie said mildly, Facts can never be reconciled with faith.

Jack Vance
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
The life we've been leading couldn't last forever. It's a wonder it lasted as long as it did.

Jack Vance
What a strange and unfamiliar world if everyone were treated according to his deserts!

Jack Vance
Human interactions, stimulated as they are by disequilibrium, never achieve balance. In even the most favorable transaction, one party—whether he realizes it or not—must always come out the worse.

Jack Vance
Until work has reached its previous stage nympharium privileges are denied to all.

Jack Vance