Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.

While we are alive we should sit among colored lights and taste good wines, and discuss our adventures in far places; when we are dead, the opportunity is past.

I got done writing Ports of Call and suddenly realized I have far too much material for the book.

In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.

The void is a mouth crying to be filled, a blank mind aching for thought, a cavity desperate for shape. What is not implies what is.

The inscrutability [of economics] is perhaps not unintentional. It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.

But I've sure worked at jobs where I have been under inspection.