Poul Anderson Quotes

I really liked that girl."
"Not loved, evidently," I observed.
"N-n-no. I supposed not. Though what is love, anyway? Doesn't it have so infinitely many kinds and degrees and mutations and quantum jumps that— Never mind.

Corruption rewards its favorites with jobs.

For himself, he had never thought it would be this bad. He had stopped remembering her, except maybe ten times a day, but now she came to him and the forgetting would have to be done all over again.

And never forget: any planet is a world, as complex and mysterious in its own right, as full of its patterns and contradictions and histories, as Earth ever was.

It was true. Men died and civilization died, but before they died they lived. It was not altogether futile.

Is that all he wants?" McCready wondered. "Shuffling papers in an office, forever?

Anderson demonstrates that if one accepts a sham mystery as real, one has stopped or strayed in the search for truth, and truth has survival value.

Yeah. 'Environment' was very big for a while. Ecology Now stickers on the windshields of cars belonging to hairy young men—cars which dripped oil wherever they parked and took off in clouds of smoke thicker than your pipe can produce...Before long, the fashionable cause was something else, I forget what. Anyhow, that whole phase—the wave after wave of causes—passed away. People completely stopped caring...
I feel a moral certainty that a large part of the disaster grew from this particular country, the world's most powerful, the vanguard country for things both good and ill...never really trying to meet the responsibilities of power. We'll make halfhearted attempts to stop some enemies in Asia, and because the attempts are halfhearted we'll piss away human lives—on both sides—and treasure—to no purpose. Hoping to placate the implacable, we'll estrange our last few friends. Men elected to national office will solemnly identify inflation with rising prices, which is like identifying red spots with the measles virus, and slap on wage and price controls, which is like papering the cracks in a house whose foundations are sliding away. So economic collapse brings international impotence...As for our foolish little attempts to balance what we drain from the environment against what we put back—well, I mentioned that car carrying the ecology sticker. At first Americans will go on an orgy of guilt. Later they'll feel inadequate. Finally they'll turn apathetic. After all, they'll be able to buy any anodyne, any pseudo-existence they want.

His will grew tight again. This was no age for weaklings. You had to do whatever seemed best, without letting gods or men or the lower devils deter you.

I’m afraid I’m not a convert or anything. I still see the same blind cosmos governed by the same blind laws. But suddenly it matters. It matters terribly, and means something. What, I haven’t figured out yet. I probably never will. But I have a reason for living, or for dying if need be. Maybe that’s the whole purpose of life: purpose itself. I can’t say. But I expect to enjoy the world a lot more.

They were not plagued that night, which Hugi said was without doubt because something worse was being prepared. Holger was inclined to share the dwarf’s pessimism.

My mother taught me a Spanish saying," he remarked, "that it takes four men to make a salad: a spendthrift for the oil, a philosopher for the seasonings, a miser for the vinegar, and a madman for the tossing.

Collectively as well as individually, man is never going to find perfection. Some societies he builds may work better, for the majority anyhow, than others. But all of them will have their built-in drawbacks. Their affairs will always be conducted with a high irreducible minimum of inefficiency. Read: sentimentalism, magical thinking, shortsightedness, vanity, greed, envy, hate, fear – not because we are evil but because we are mortal.

Holger wished he had read the old tales more closely; he had only a dim childhood recollection of them.

Men, whose span is cruelly short, rush nonetheless to death in their youth as to a maiden’s arms.