"Conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings……" — Jack Vance
"Conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable. As a preliminary, the conversationalist must gauge the mood, the intelligence and the verbal facility of the company. To this end, a few words of pedantic exposition often prove invaluable."
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Jack Vance
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45 Quotes by Jack Vance
Jack Vance has 45 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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Right now I'm so old that if I had a big gush of money, I don't know what I'd do…
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The inscrutability [of economics] is perhaps not unintentional. It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges…
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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…
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Of all questions, why? is the least pertinent. It begs the question; it assumes the larger part of its own…
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This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails…
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But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on…
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But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to…
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I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.
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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…
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I haven't sold to the movies. In other words, I haven't gotten any enormous checks yet.
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I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.
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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
See all 45 quotes by Jack Vance »
More Allusion Quotes
This quote is filed under Allusion Quotes,
one of 30 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the…
— William James
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I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
— Clifton Fadiman
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Life has been compared to a race, but the allusion improves by observing, that the most swift are usually the…
— Oliver Goldsmith
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Women have always collected things and saved and recycled them because leftovers yielded nourishment in new forms. The decorative functional…
— Unknown Author
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The spirit of tanka interests me more than following rigid conventions. As I understand it, the tradition allows a variety…
— Harryette Mullen
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An allusion has been made to the Homestead Law. I think it worthy of consideration, and that the wild lands…
— Abraham Lincoln
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This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a…
— Jean Baudrillard
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Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.
— Umberto Eco
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One would naturally expect that the Lord Jesus Christ would be sufficiently important to receive ample notice in the literature…
— Merrill C. Tenney
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Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it…
— Amy Waldman
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The absolutely Non-Manifested cannot be designated by any expression which could limit It, Separate It, or include It. In spite…
— Abdelkader El Djezairi
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Graphic design is a visual language uniting harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and content. But…
— Jessica Helfand
See all 30 Allusion Quotes »