# Quote — Jack Vance, Marune: Alastor 933

> 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.

- Author: [Jack Vance](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jack-vance.md)
- Book: [Marune: Alastor 933](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jack-vance/marune-alastor-933.md)
- Page: 245
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jack_Vance#Marune:_Alastor_933_(1975)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jack-vance/marune-alastor-933/here-was-the

## More from this book

> 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 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jack-vance/marune-alastor-933/by-an-axiom.md)

> 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 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jack-vance/marune-alastor-933/the-rhune-is-not.md)

> “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 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jack-vance/marune-alastor-933/only-children-are.md)