Jack Vance - The Dying Earth (1950)

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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
It had been suggested to her that the flaw lay not in the universe but in herself.

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

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
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
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
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
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
"Very well," said Cugel. "I will ride with you to Taun Tassel, but you must accept these three terces in full, exact, final, comprehensive and complete compensation for the ride and every other aspect, adjunct, by-product and consequence, either direct or indirect, of the said ride, renouncing every other claim, now, and forever, including all times of the past and future, without exception, and absolving me, in part and in whole, from any and all further obligation."
Iucounu held up small balled fists and gritted his teeth toward the sky. "I repudiate your entire paltry philosophy! I find zest in giving!"

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

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

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

Jack Vance
"A natural scientist, examining a single atom, might well be able to asserevate the structure and history of the entire universe!" : Bah!" muttered Hurtiancz. "By the same token, a sensible man need lisen to but a single word in order to recognize the whole for egregious nonsense."

Jack Vance
"I distrusted him from the start! Still, who could imagine such protean depravity?"
Bunderwal, the supercargo, concurred. "Cugel, while plausible, nonetheless is a bit of a scoundrel."

Jack Vance
An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.

Jack Vance
Yes, I realize that I see but a semblance, but so do you, and who is to say which is real?

Jack Vance
When one deals with the Murthe, the unthinkable becomes the ordinary, and Zanzel's repute carries no more weight than last year's mouse-dropping - if that much.

Jack Vance
I must cite an intrinsic condition of the universe. We set forth in any direction which seems convenient; each leads to the same place: the end of the universe.

Jack Vance
Notice this rent in my garment; I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.

Jack Vance
Excellent; all is well. The 'everlasting tedium' exactly countervenes the 'immediate onset of death' and I am left only with the 'canker' which, in the person of Firx, already afflicts me. One must use his wits in dealing with maledictions.

Jack Vance