In the early 2000s, DyingEarth.com featured a Jack Vance Random Quote Generator. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to figure out how to incorporate a random generator into WordPress without adding new plugins – so, in lieu of that, here’s a random table of 68 Jack Vance quotes for you to play with at your leisure.
If you haven’t picked up a d68 yet (for some reason), you can use this program through AnyDice. Just click on “roller,” and then “roll,” in the middle of the page.
1 | “The fellow is bereft and possibly violent.” |
2 | “Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic” |
3 | “A strange abstract law that Pandelume termed ‘Mathematics'” |
4 | “Embelyon was lost, renounced. And T’sais wept.” |
5 | “May Kraan preserve their living brains in acid!” |
6 | “Thus in the dark of the night the spell of Javanne the witch was circumvented and nullified.” |
7 | “My brain is whole! – I see the world!” |
8 | “And souls go thrilling up like bubbles in a beaker of mead!” |
9 | “I am Liane the Wayfarer. Peril goes with me.” |
10 | “At his elbow a voice said, ‘I am Chun the Unavoidable.'” |
11 | “Mincing murder, extravagant debauchery, while Earth passes its last hour.” |
12 | “The vapid mannerisms of pale people, using up their lives.” |
13 | “Thus and so.” |
14 | “The city dissolved into turbulence – the result of a freak religious hysteria.” |
15 | “Whom does a Raider raid?” |
16 | “You should practice optimism.” |
17 | “Why do squares have more sides than triangles?” |
18 | “How will we see when the sun goes out?” |
19 | “Do flowers grow under the ocean?” |
20 | “Do stars hiss and sizzle when rain comes by night?” |
21 | “The void in his mind athrob for the soothing pressure of knowledge.” |
22 | “I am Guyal of Sfere, by the River Scaum in Ascolais.” |
23 | “I am forced to believe you guilty of impertinence, impiety, disregard and impudicity.” |
24 | “I must order you secured, contained, pent, incarcerated and confined.” |
25 | “Go, I exhort; go I command; go, go, go!” |
26 | “My eye went to you like the nectar moth flits to jacynth.” |
27 | “It is but the diseased effort of an elder artist.” |
28 | “Go, else I loose the actinics.” |
29 | “My clever baton holds your unnatural sorcery in abeyance.” |
30 | “Baton, said Kerlin, perform thy utmost intent.” |
31 | “We go to the image expander; there we will explode the ghost to the macroid dimension.” |
32 | “Sixty bobbins: Blikdak was no more.” |
33 | “He had known many vicissitudes, gaining therefrom a suppleness, a fine disposition, a mastery of both bravado and stealth” |
34 | “My talismans are not obviously useless.” |
35 | “I am a man of resource, but not insensate recklessness.” |
36 | “Have no fear, declared Cugel, my word is my bond.” |
37 | “Cease the bickering! I am indulging the exotic whims of a beautiful princess and must not be distracted.” |
38 | “Am I known as Cugel the Clever for nothing?” |
39 | “My name is of no consequence. You may address me as ‘Exalted‘.” |
40 | “She contrived to twist her body into first one luxurious postion, then another.” |
41 | “I become drunk as circumstances dictate.” |
42 | “A doomed man needs no such elegant footwear.” |
43 | “Only the fact of my broken limbs prevents me from leaping at your throat.” |
44 | “Only yesterday Dadio Fessadil used a nineteen-guage freezing-bar to groove the bead of a small inverted quatrefoil.” |
45 | “Until work has reached its previous stage nympharium privileges are denied to all.” |
46 | “I envision the usual period as a rubble-gatherer, before he is entrusted with tool-sharpening and preliminary excavation.” |
47 | “First you are swathed head to foot in the intestines of fresh killed owls.” |
48 | “It is an unthinkable discrepancy that fifty-four men should consume the food intended for fifty-three.” |
49 | “The creature displayed the qualities reminiscent of both coelenterate and echinoderm. A terrene nudibranch? A mollusc deprived of its shell? More importantly, was the creature edible?” |
50 | “The wrong that has been committed demands a counter act to validate the Law of Equipoise.” |
51 | “Today occurred the concatenation; the \’creature\’ as you call it, pervolved upon itself; in your idiotic malice you devoured it.” |
52 | “It expresses the symbollic significance of NULLITY to which TOTALLITY must necessarily attach itself, by Kratunjae’s Second Law of Cryptorrhoid Affinities.” |
53 | “Perhaps you will accept this sum to spare me the effort of carrying it?” |
54 | “Gid: hybrid of man, gargoyle, whorl, leaping insect.” |
55 | “Grue: man, ocular, the unusual hoon.” |
56 | “For a single terce you may own a long-necked big-bellied creature of astounding voracity.” |
57 | “We prostrate ourselves before the fish-god Yob, who seems as efficacious as any.” |
58 | “We worship the inexorable god known as Dangott. Strangers are automatically heretics, and so are fed to the sacred apes.” |
59 | “I am Cugel: like yourself, a seeker after enlightenment,” |
60 |
“ZARAIDES THE WIZARD His Work-book: Beware!” |
61 | “The Law of Equivalences has been disturbed; and I must contrive a reciprocity.” |
62 | “Does Zaraides the Sage fear to identify himself with the casue of justice? Does he blink and draw aside from one so timid and vacillating as Iucounu? In a word – yes, said Zaraides.” |
63 | “All is mutablitity, and thus your three hundred terces has fluctuated to three.” |
64 | “How was one to reason with a magician not only droll and irascible, but also bereft?” |
65 | “By and large Cugel was disappointed by what seemed a lack of innate competence.” |
66 | “I suffer from a spiritual malaise which manifests itself in outbursts of vicious rage.” |
67 | “So now, be off! Or I inflict upon you the Spell of the Macroid Toe, whereupon the signalized member swells to the proportions of a house.” |
68 | “Twango’s hospitality, though largely symbolic, does him credit.” |
The Dying Earth — and its rules-lighter version the Revivification Folio — take you into the world of master fantasist Jack Vance, where a flashing sword is less important than nimble wits, persuasive words,and a fine sense of fashion. Survive by your cunning, search for lost lore, or command the omnipotent but quarrelsome sandestins. Purchase The Dying Earth or the Revivification Folio in print and PDF at the Pelgrane Shop.