Jack Vance Quotes

It is such a complex matter we live within, it is impossible to track logic and decision making really, so therefore each choice can actually only be seen as coincidence.

The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

You never know why something works or doesn't.

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

You learn that not all things fall into a certain kind of pattern that can be predictable and that can be understandable and that's going to be easy, you know.

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.

Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.

When everything is perfectly orderly and understandable, there has to be one thing that puts everything into question.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead

History is totally unpredictable.

How dare we speak of the laws of chance? Is not chance the antithesis of all law?

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

The world is unpredictable.

We're dealing with the chaos of life, and we're rubbing it down. The deeper you rub, the more patterns you can see until you realize that it's really an organized chaos. There isn't really ever any chance to understand it all, but we're here to keep rubbing.

In conlusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.

This tremendous friction which cannot, as in mechanics, be reduced to a few points, is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured just because they are largely due to chance.

Life doesn't have plots and subplots and denouements. It's just a big collection of loose ends and dangling threads that never get explained.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. Which is chaotic.