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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2d7d486 | Bending, she kissed Glawen's cheek. "Thank you for a lovely day." "Wait!" cried Glawen. "Come back!" "I think not," said Wayness, and ran off up the path to Riverview House." | Jack Vance | ||
| 85770c2 | Extraordinary that those who command the perquisites of place are those most ready to ignore them! It is as if the blessings of Providence are specious, and notable only in their absence. Ah well, I refuse to speculate. | Jack Vance | ||
| d725cd4 | Earth . . . A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge . . . Ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is red and feeble . . . A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live. There is evil on Earth . . . Earth is dying . . . | Jack Vance | ||
| 884601c | The pre-dawn air was quiet and cool; the sky showed the colors of citron, pearl, and apricot, which were reflected from the sea. Out from the Tumbling River estuary drifted the black ship Smaadra, propelled across the water by its sweeps. A mile offshore, the sweeps were shipped. The yards were raised, sails sheeted taut and back-stays set up. With the sunrise came breeze; the ship glided quickly and quietly into the east, and presently Tro.. | Jack Vance | ||
| 1f92046 | Public convenience or dignity means nothing; police prerogatives assume the status of divine law. Submissiveness is demanded. If a police officer kills a civilian, it is a regrettable circumstance: the officer was possibly over-zealous. If a civilian kills a police officer all hell breaks loose. The police foam at the mouth. All other business comes to a standstill until the perpetrator of this most dastardly act is found out. Inevitably, w.. | Jack Vance | ||
| 539ef63 | The young woman quoted Turgenev, "If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly or even harm him, you reproach him with every defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself." | turgenev vice | Jack Vance | |
| bd46330 | How can we do this? We are told that our world is too small for men of eternal life. This is true. We must become pioneers again, we must break out into new territories! The men of old carved living space from the wilderness; we must do the same, and let this be the condition for eternal life! Is it not sufficient? When a man creates his living space and guarantees his sustenance, is he not entitled to life? | Jack Vance | ||
| 2a647a6 | When we shattered the Actuarian, we shattered the bar across the sky. Now, life, eternal life, is at anyone's demand. Man must move forward; this is the nature of his brain and blood. Today he is given the Earth; his destiny is the stars. The entire universe awaits him! And so, why should we quaver and hedge at life for all of us? | Jack Vance | ||
| 459ec61 | She seems somewhat morose and out of sorts. Do you beat her often?' 'I must admit that I do not.' 'There is the answer! Beat her well; beat her often! It will bring roses to her cheeks! There is nothing better to induce good cheer in a woman than a fine constitutional beating. | humour wife-beating | Jack Vance | |
| 57f14c2 | Shimrod gave the boy a copper penny. 'Bring me now a goblet of good tawny wine.' By a sleight of magic Shimrod augmented the acuity of his hearing, so that the whispers of two young lovers in a far corner were now clearly audible, as were the innkeeper's instructions to Fonsel in regard to the watering of Shimrod's wine. | wine | Jack Vance | |
| 1a96f9a | She sighed, staring down at the foothills of Cobalt Mountain. "I have been summoned to the Paeolinas' court to attend the coronation after-ball." "I was unaware the Queen was ill." "The Queen was not aware of it either," replied Paytim. "Her brother poisoned her and seized control of the Crimson Messuage. He has impertinently invited me to attend his coronation as Paeolina the Twenty-Ninth." "An occasion for celebration. The charm is then a.. | George R.R. Martin | ||
| f641cf9 | We hold that gain after toil, triumph after adversity, achievement to a goal long-sought, is a greater beneficence than prebendary nutrient from the teat of an indulgent government. | Jack Vance | ||
| 98c4cdf | I would offer congratulations were it not for this tentacle gripping my leg. | humor tentacle | Jack Vance | |
| 9c78ece | If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind. Few such conflicts can match the First Vegan Wars for grotesque excess. | Jack Vance | ||
| 53c05f7 | First coming aboard, a new arrival makes a cautious survey of the crew, trying to winnow the affable and good-natured from the surly and truculent. Some of the crewmen will seem easygoing, happy-go-lucky, good-fellows-all; others may appear to be reserved or even aloof. Yet I found that at the end of a voyage these aloof ones were often the persons whom I grew to like and respect the most, while those who seemed so agreeable turned out to b.. | relationships friendship new-friends wariness | Jack Vance | |
| 7dcb11f | Within and about the Forest of Tantrevalles existed a hundred or more fairy shees, each the castle of a fairy tribe. Thripsey Shee on Madling Meadow, little more than a mile within the precincts of the forest, was ruled by King Throbius and his spouse Queen Bossum. His realm included Madling Meadow and as much of the forest surrounding as was consistent with his dignity. The fairies at Thripsey numbered eighty-six. | Jack Vance | ||
| e7c6e0b | Two hours of loose philosophizing will never tilt the scale against the worth of one sound belch. | Jack Vance | ||
| f4bef0d | The police mentality cannot regard a human being in terms other than as an item or object to be processed as expeditiously as possible. | Jack Vance | ||
| 2aae50f | In this room, he told himself, history might have been written, the course of cosmic empire might have been shaped and the fate of stars decided. But now there was no sign of life, just a brooding silence that seemed to whisper in a tongueless language of days and faces and problems long since wiped out by the march of years. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| fa99649 | As if this were a special place, one of those special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count himself as lucky if he ever found it, for there were those who sought and never found it. And worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it. He | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 4ccb9b9 | Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven't got mob psychology anymore. You can't have mob psychology when people don't give a damn what happens to a thing that's dead already--a political system that broke down under its own weight. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 448cff1 | We have fallen on hard times of the spirit, with many of the people more concerned with fear of evil than contemplation of the good. | positive-thinking negative-thinking | Clifford D. Simak | |
| f1c5fc3 | The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship--a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one's thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family. Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed f.. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 5b189bf | Well," said Winslowe, moving over to plant himself behind the wheel, "it don't matter much what any of us are, just so we get along with one another. If some of the nations would only take a lesson from some small neighborhood like ours--a lesson in how to get along--the world would be a whole lot better." Enoch" | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 6324892 | Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 22af03e | Unconventional," said Jenkins. "What is conventional?" asked Andrew. "Living in a dream? Living for a memory? you must be weary of it." "Not" | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 45f113a | Had the memory worn thin? Had the debt he owed been paid? Had he discharged the last ounce of devotion? "There are worlds out there," Andrew was saying, "and life on some of them. Even some intelligence. There is work to do." He" | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| f2b6fb6 | A yellow leaf fluttered down from overhead and settled in his lap, a clear, almost transparent yellow against the brownness of the robe. He moved to brush it off and then he let it stay. For who am I, he thought, to interfere with or dispute even such a simple thing as the falling of a leaf. He | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 8c61377 | The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship - a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one's thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family. Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed.. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 8b20136 | Look, Nathaniel. Men may not always be the way they are today. They may change. And, if they do, you have to carry on; you have to take the dream and keep it going. You'll have to pretend that you are men." "Us dogs," Nathaniel pledged, "will do it." "It won't come for thousands and thousands of years," said Grant. "You will have time to get ready. But you must know. You must pass the word along. You must not forget." "I know," said Nathani.. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| d600ec0 | We realized that among us, among all the races, we had a staggering fund of knowledge and of techniques - that working together, by putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arrive at something that would be far greater and more significant than any race, alone, could hope of accomplishing. | war | Clifford D. Simak | |
| f1f0688 | And yet he had learned to submerge that sense of horror, to disregard the outward appearance of it, to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as people. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 5c1bcb5 | Here, in this waiting room, one could see a cross section of them--the hoppers, the creepers, the crawlers, the wrigglers, and rollers that came from the many planets, from so many stars. Earth was the galactic melting pot, he thought, a place where beings from the thousand stars met and mingled to share their thoughts and cultures. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 289519d | There isn't any room," said Joshua. "You travel back along the line of time and you don't find the past, but another world, another bracket of consciousness. The earth would be the same, you see, or almost the same. Same trees, same rivers, same hills, but it wouldn't be the world we know. Because it has lived a different life, it has developed differently. The second back of us is not the second back of us at all, but another second, a tot.. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 8b42402 | He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand. And the fact of the matter was that he had just barely understood enough to make the concept work, but had not understood enough to be aware of its consequences. With | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 275fd46 | What is a bow and arrow? It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war. It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering. It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 84d4a5e | Has it ever occurred to you that business as you think of it may have outlived its usefulness? Business has made its contribution and the world moves on. Business is just another dodo. . . . | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| c17d347 | And that day the cultural god of science had shone a bit less brightly, had died a little in the people's minds. | science idolatry | Clifford D. Simak | |
| 9802541 | Squatted beside the fire, with the warmth of it upon his face and hands, he felt a smug contentment that seemed strangely out of place--the contentment of a man who had reduced his needs to the strictly basic--and with the contentment came a full-bodied confidence that was just as out of place. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 60081d7 | University politics," declared Oop, "doesn't care about liberal traditions or any other kind of traditions." | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 028f633 | Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and the viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome. That | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 19dfd3b | He sat there thinking of Man's capacity for the wiping out of species--sometimes in hate or fear, at other times for the simple love of gain. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| db139e4 | As if this were a special place, one of those special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count himself as lucky if he ever found it, for there were those who sought and never found it. And worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 4bd63c8 | But when a tree speaks to one, what is one to do? On | Clifford D. Simak |