Jack Vance quotes - page 6

All is mutability, and thus your three hundred terces has fluctuated to three. (Jack Vance)
The purportedly free was seldom as represented. View quote
Jack Vance
Man is a creature whose evolutionary environment has been the open air. His nerves, muscles, and senses have developed across three million years in contiguity with natural earth, crude stone, live wood, wind, and rain. Now this creature is suddenly--on the geologic scale, instantaneously--shifted to an unnatural environment of metal and glass, plastic and plywood, to which his psychic substrata lack all compatibility. The wonder is not that we have so much mental instability but so little. View quote
Jack Vance
Until work has reached its previous stage nympharium privileges are denied to all. View quote
Jack Vance
He's like an imbecile with a pepper shaker; a little makes his food taste good, therefore a lot will make it wonderful. View quote
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. View quote
Jack Vance
"The contingency is remote." (This is also a Jeeves quote in the PG Wodehouse Novels) View quote
Jack Vance
I am not called Cugel the Clever for nothing. View quote
Jack Vance
Control is necessary and even good-so long as I do the controlling. View quote
Jack Vance
I have seen all I care to see and heard rather more. View quote
Jack Vance
If the past is a house of many chambers, then the present is the most recent coat of paint. (Jack Vance)
Damned meddlers. It's hard to know when their curiosity is official and when it's just curiosity. View quote
Jack Vance
My fees are not too high. Your wage scale may simply be too low. View quote
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. View quote
Jack Vance
Die then. This is my cure for sore knees. View quote
Jack Vance
Your thoughts move with the deft precision of worm-tracks in the mud. View quote
Jack Vance
We'll rack our brains and either solve your problem or come up come up with new and better ones. View quote
Jack Vance
If one basic axiom controls the cosmos, it must be this: In a situation of infinity every possible condition occurs, not once, but an infinite number of times. View quote
Jack Vance
Your character, Apollon Zamp, is marred by a certain paltriness of spirit, a diffused universal distrust which I truly deplore. View quote
Jack Vance
Dango, Pume, Thwither: down with Visbhume's breeches; let him hold his backside at the ready. View quote
Jack Vance
Man had dominated the Earth by virtue of a single assumption: that an effect could be traced to a cause, itself the effect of a previous cause. Manipulation of this basic law yielded rich results; there seemed no need for any other tool or instrumentality. Man congratulated himself on his generalized structure. He could live on desert, on plain or ice, in forest or in city; Nature had not shaped him to a special environment. He was unaware of his vulnerability. Logic was the special environment; the brain was the special tool. (Jack Vance)
Now was the present, now was the time containing that sweet union of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, spirit, will and imagination named Nancy. View quote
Jack Vance
I'm sure you didn't mean to hurt anyone.” Madoc Roswyn laughed a soft forlorn laugh. "The sad truth is that I didn't care-which may be worse. View quote
Jack Vance
I would define ‘avarice' as a consequence of the human estate: a condition arising from turbulence and inequality. In none of the paradises, where conditions are no doubt optimum, does ‘avarice' exert force. Here, we are men struggling toward perfection and ‘avarice' is a station along the way. View quote
Jack Vance
You are a particularly clever girl: almost as clever as you are appealing to the eye. View quote
Jack Vance