Poul Anderson Quotes

So much American science fiction is parochial -- not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way...

Don’t get me wrong. These people are mine. I like and in many ways admire them. They’re the salt of the earth. It’s simply that I want other condiments too.

Inland, all except criminals lived in a tightly pulled net of regulations, duties, social standing, tax collection, expectations of how to act and speak and think—“sort of like late twentieth-century USA” Everard grumbled to himself.

I’ll give you one thing to mull over, though. If the body’s such a valueless piece of pork, and we’ll all meet each other in the sweet bye and bye, and so on, why’re you busting every gut you own to get back to your wife?

So why was a civilian going armed? It bespoke a degree of lawlessness that fitted ill with a technological society.

You were right. We should never have created science. It brought the twilight of the race."
"I never said that. The race brought its own destruction, through misuse of science. Our culture was scientific anyway, in all except its psychological basis. It's up to us to take that last and hardest step. If we do, the race may yet survive.

The universe held as many surprises as it did stars. No, more. That was its glory. But someday one of them was bound to kill you.

Are you happy?
Your question is meaningless. I am occupied. I participate in operations, I am one with the accomplishments.

Light fills the air, wind is aglow, drink of it, breathe of it, make leafing. Rainfall sows itself, it grows down through soil to the secret places where stones abide; it brings the strength of them up rootward. Lie still, molder away, then be again grass.

The end of the world—was the sky going to open up, would the angels pour down the vials of wrath on a shaking land, and would God appear to judge the sons of men? He listened for the noise of great galloping hoofs, but there was only the wind in the trees.
That was the worst of it. The sky didn’t care. The Earth went on turning through an endlessness of dark and silence, and what happened in the thin scum seething over its crust didn’t matter.

“I wonder if there are any gods at all—if they aren’t just another story.”
Tom and Owl shrank from him. But no lightning struck.

Mortal combat corrupts, and war corrupts absolutely.

I've heard assorted rhapsodies about humankind going to the stars, of course. Who hasn't? Each of them founders on the practical problems." "The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems.

At most, the gods gave only a little happiness; the rest was merely existence.

He’d seen too often how little of the universe is designed for man to neglect any safety measure.