Poul Anderson Quotes

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 walk beyond town, many of these nights, to stand under the high autumnal stars, look upward and wonder.

A cultured, sensitive, observant man is a pleasure to be with in any age.

It would annoy me less that we’re heading into a new puritanical era if the puritanism concerned itself about things that matter.

There was a huge sadness in it—the little men of today, gnawing apart the mighty works they no longer understood. In a few hundred years, or a few thousand, what did it matter? Nothing would be left, nothing but rubble and waving grass and the wild dogs howling where men had once lived.

You cannot imagine how wearisome existence grows, alone and immortal.

Once this was a free country. Oh, I always knew that couldn’t last, that here too things were bound to grind back to the norm—masters and serfs, whatever names they go by. And so far we continue happier than most of the world ever was. But damn, modern democracy has the technology to regiment us beyond anything Caesar, Torquemada, Suleyman, or Louis XIV dared dream of.

That is forgotten, their wars and their deeds and their very speech. Wisdom lasts. It is what I have sought across the world.

“He says giants built it in the morning of the world,” Hanno told Pytheas.
“Then his people are as ignorant as we,” the Greek said low.

Hard to say whether personal immortality would be a good thing or not. Not for the masses, surely! Too many of them as it was. But a select few, like Terangi Maclaren—or was it worth the trouble? Even given boats, chess, music, the No Drama, beautiful women and beautiful spectroscopes, life could get heavy.

It sounds rather silly, doesn’t it? One little man thinking he can change history all by his lonesome. A lot of trouble has been caused by that delusion.

People usually take for granted that the way things are is the way things must be.

His conscience must have gotten tired of nagging him and delivered an ultimatum.

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.

Everard was not so sure; he had seen enough human misery in all the ages. You got case-hardened after a while, but down underneath, when a peasant stared at you with sick brutalized eyes, or a soldier screamed with a pike through him, or a city went up in radioactive flame, something wept. He could understand the fanatics who had tried to change events. It was only that their work was so unlikely to make anything better...