Jack Vance Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

He indicated the pair of grotesques. "For instance, I have seldom seen objects so studiously repulsive as this pair of bibelots. Skillfully done, agreed! Notice the detail in these horrid little ears! The snouts, the fangs: the malignance is almost real! Still, they are undeniably the work of a diseased imagination."
The objects reared erect. One of them spoke in a rasping voice: "No doubt Cugel has good reason for his unkind words; still, neither Gark nor I can take them lightly."

Jack Vance
Sir, my life, drab and insipid though it may seem to others, is the only life given me to live.

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

Jack Vance
Is this the conduct of a 'sly and unpredictable villain'?
Decidedly so, if the villain, for the purposes of his joke, thinks to simulate the altruist.
Then how will you know villain from altruist?
Cugel shrugged. It is not an important distinction.

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
Navigation on this lake is forbidden to aliens, he declared. We are ordered to sink all intruding vessels. Prepare to drown.

Jack Vance
You drink only sparingly. Is the beer too thin?
No at all. I merely wish to keep my wits about me. It would not do if both of us became addled, and later woke up in doubt as to who was who.

Jack Vance
Ildefonse said ponderously: "If your analysis is correct, we must undertake to secure the future against this pangynic nightmare."

Jack Vance
'Humanity is old, civilization is new: the mesh of cogs is by no means smooth and this is as it should be. Never should a man enter a building of glass or metal, or a spaceship, or a submarine, without a small shock of astonishment; never should he avoid an act of passion without a small sense of effort. We of the Institute receive an intensive historical inculcation; we know the men of the past, and we have projected dozens of possible future variations, which, without exception, are repulsive. Man, as he exists now, with all his faults and vices, a thousand gloriously irrational compromises between two thousand sterile absolutes is optimal. Or so it seems to us who are men.'

Jack Vance
I challenge Destiny, yes, but I do not leap off cliffs.

Jack Vance
"Llorio, you are a woman of surpassing beauty, though you would seem to lack that provocative warmth which draws man to woman, and adds dimension to the character."
The Murthe responded curtly: "The quality you describe is a kind of lewd obsequiousness which, happily, has now become obsolete. As for the 'surpassing beauty,' it is an apotheotic quality generated by the surging music of the female soul, which you, in your crassness, perceive only as a set of pleasing contours."

Jack Vance
We need no chieftain; such folk eat more than their share.

Jack Vance
The colour, noise and festivity failed to elevate Carfilhiot's mood; in fact—so he told himself—never had he witnessed so much pointless nonsense.

Jack Vance
"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."

Jack Vance
Ah! Five hundred years I have toiled to entice this creature, despairing, doubting, brooding by night, yet never abandoning hope that my calculations were accurate and my great talisman cogent. Then, when finally it appears, you fall upon it for no other reason than to sate your repulsive gluttony!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack Vance