"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 Literature See all quotes by Jack Vance →

React to this quote

More by Jack Vance

“Evidently you do not trust me. This does not predispose me to trust you.”

“My fees are not too high. Your wage scale may simply be too low.”

“My clever baton holds your unnatural sorcery in abeyance.”

““Why not alter the habits of a lifetime and speak with candour?” asked Shimrod. “Truth, after all, need not be only the tactic of last resort.”

“I suspect that the word was invented by second-rate intelligences to describe the incomprehensible activities of their betters.”

“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.”

Resonant Thoughts

"I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason."

— Douglas Coupland

Literature1961

#philosophy

"The basic word I-Thou can be spoken only with one's whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a Thou…"

— Martin Buber

Philosophy1878–1965

#philosophy

"There I also met the Spanish priest Antonio Llidó. He was accused of having hidden and protected people of the MIR who were persecuted. Antonio Llidó never denied this, saying that he could not lie to…"

— Antonio Llidó

Religion1936–1974

#philosophy

"Another expression of this tendency is the induction of Muslim divines into Sikh history, e.g. the by now widespread story that the foundation stone of the Hari Mandir was laid by the Sufi pîr Mian Mi…"

— Khushwant Singh

Politics1915–2014

#philosophy