“Your thoughts move with the deft precision of worm-tracks in the mud.”
Source: The Languages of Pao (1958), Chapter 14 (p. 149)
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Jack Vance 213
American mystery and speculative fiction writer 1916–2013Related quotes

Source: Soul Curry for You and Me: An Empowering Philosophy that Can Enrich Your Life, P. 31.
Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 150
Context: The continuity of film, in which the writer deals with a track of images moving at a given rate of speed, and a separate sound-track which is joined arbitrarily to the image-track, is closer to the continuity of poetry than anything else in art. But the heaviness of the collective work on a commercial film, the repressive codes and sanctions, unspoken and spoken, the company-town feeling raised to its highest, richest, most obsessive-compulsive level in Hollywood, puts the process at the end of any creative spectrum farthest from the making of a poem.
At the same time, almost anything that can be said to make the difficulties of poetry dissolve for the reader, or even to make the reader want to deal with those "difficulties," can be said in terms of film. These images are like the action sequences of a well-made movie — a good thriller will use the excitement of timing, of action let in from several approaches, of crisis prepared for emotionally and intellectually, so that you can look back and recognize the way of its arrival; or, better, feel it coming until the moment of proof arrives, meeting your memory and your recognition.
The cutting of films is a parable in the motion of any art that lives in time, as well as a parable in the ethics of communication.

“Be patient and wait. Your mud will settle. Your water will be clear.”
The Philosophical Emperor, a Political Experiment, or, The Progress of a False Position: (1841)
Context: After hearing incessantly that the people follow him without sense or discretion, he [the political leader] is liable to fall a victim of the delusion which he has created, and to imagine that he possesses some personal attraction, by virtue of which he is followed. The delusion soon develops itself. He will diverge from the authorized track... From habit, the people will move a little in his erratic course. Their compliance augments his delusion, and he will become increasingly regardless of the popular will, and more obstinately intent on his own. He soon becomes monomaniac, and is abandoned except by a few stragglers as crazy as himself; while he interprets the abandonment into ingratitude or heterodoxy, and grows scurrilous, turbulent, and impotent.

“You gave me your mud and I have turned it to gold.”
Tu m’as donné ta boue et j’en ai fait de l’or.
"Ébauche d’un épilogue pour la 2e édition," Les Fleurs du Mal (1861), Appendice II: Autres pièces http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Fleurs_du_mal_-_Ebauche_d'un_%C3%A9pilogue_pour_la_2e_%C3%A9dition

“Here life is, moves; faintly. A wrist. The faint throb of blood, precise, miraculous . . .”
Him (1927)
Context: Here life is, moves; faintly. A wrist. The faint throb of blood, precise, miraculous... And they talk of dying! The blood delicately descending and ascending: making an arm. Being an arm. The warm flesh, the dim slender flesh filled with life, slenderer than a miracle, frailer... These are the shoulders through which fell the world. The dangerous shoulders of Eve, in god's entire garden newly strolling.