# Marune: Alastor 933

- Author: [Jack Vance](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jack-vance.md)
- Quotes: 5
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jack-vance/marune-alastor-933

## Quotes

> By an axiom of cultural anthropology, the more isolated a community, the more idiosyncratic become its customs and conventions. This of course is not necessarily disadvantageous.

p. 245

> The Rhune is not a likable man. He is so sensitive as to be truculent; he is contemptuous of all other races than the Rhune. He is self-centered, arrogant, unsympathetic in his judgments.

p. 197

> Here was the milieu he loved: conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable. As a preliminary, the conversationalist must gauge the mood, the intelligence, and the verbal facility of the company.

p. 245

> “Only children are intolerant of conventions. They are indispensable to an organized civilization, like discipline to an army, or foundations to a building, or landmarks to a traveler. Without conventions civilization is a handful of water. An army without discipline is a mob. A building without foundations is rubble. A traveler without landmarks is lost.”
>
> Lorcas stated that he opposed not all convention, but only those which he found irksome and pointless.

p. 246

> “As I listen to you I hear only ingenuousness and didactic theory.”
>
> Lorcas compressed his lips. “Perhaps because you are hearing views which contradict your emotions.”

p. 246