What I want is to commune with the land. In company I couldn’t admit that. It’d sound too pompous, as though I were from Greenpeace or the People’s R… - Poul Anderson

I never set myself up as a prophet. Those crazy preachers have been the death of thousands, and the end is not yet.

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

Aghast, Tauno exclaimed, “but this is frightful!”
“Oh? Many would count it glorious good fortune.”
His eye stabbed at hers. “Would you?”
“Well… No.”
“Locked among bleak brick walls for all her days; shorn, harshly clad, ill-fed, droning through her nose at God while letting wither that which God put between her legs; never to know love, children about her, the growth of home and kin, or even wanderings under apple trees in blossom time.…”
“Tauno, it is the way to eternal bliss.”
“Hm. Rather would I have my bliss now, and then the dark. You, too—in your heart—not so?—whether or not you have said you mean to repent on your deathbed. Your Christian Heaven seems to me a shabby place to spend forever.”