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Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.

Jack Vance

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Jack Vance
Age: 96 †
Born: 1916
Born: August 28
Died: 2013
Died: May 26
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
San Francisco County
California
John Holbrook Vance
Jack Vance
John H. Vance
Permitted
Obliged
Since

More quotes by Jack Vance

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I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
Jack Vance
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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
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Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.
Jack Vance
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Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.
Jack Vance
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As I mentioned, I was a carpenter for a time.
Jack Vance
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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
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An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.
Jack Vance
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Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.
Jack Vance
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Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.
Jack Vance
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I haven't sold to the movies. In other words, I haven't gotten any enormous checks yet.
Jack Vance
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Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.
Jack Vance
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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
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Truth is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.
Jack Vance
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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
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I give dignity second place to expedience.
Jack Vance
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Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.
Jack Vance
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I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man's accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.
Jack Vance
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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
Jack Vance
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A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.
Jack Vance
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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