I'd never been published when I was young.
If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them.
An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.
It is useless, after all, to complain against inexorable reality.
I become drunk as circumstances dictate.
Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.