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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
Since
Permitted
Obliged

More quotes by 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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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
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I do read books. I suppose it's more or less the same thing, but at least I'm alone and I'm an individual. I can stop anytime I want, which I frequently do.
Jack Vance
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Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.
Jack Vance
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Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.
Jack Vance
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There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.
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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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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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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I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.
Jack Vance
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As I mentioned, I was a carpenter for a time.
Jack Vance
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I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.
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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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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The inscrutability [of economics] is perhaps not unintentional. It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.
Jack Vance
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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
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A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.
Jack Vance
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I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.
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
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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