Poul Anderson > Quotes

“A fanatic is a man who, when he's lost sight of his purpose, redoubles his effort.”
― Poul Anderson, Harvest of Stars

“I’ve yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way didn’t become still more complicated.”
― Poul Anderson, Call Me Joe

“Happier are all men than the dwellers in Faerie – or the gods, for that matter…Better a life like a falling star, bright across the dark, than a deathlessness that can see naught above or beyond itself…the day draws nigh when Faerie shall fade, the Erlking himself shrink to a woodland sprite and then to nothing, and the gods go under. And the worst of it is, I cannot believe it wrong that the immortals will not live forever.”
― Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword

“Two lives met across death and centuries. To ask what it meant is meaningless. There is no destiny. But sometimes there is bravery”
― Poul Anderson, The Stars are Also Fire

“I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it's dull, you're just not communicating.

-Poul_Anderson”
― Poul Anderson

“ninety-nine per cent of the human race, no matter how smart they are, will do the convenient thing instead of the wise thing, and kid themselves into thinking they can somehow escape the consequences.”
― Poul Anderson, Brain Wave

“Their flight was not less exhilarating for being explainable.”
― Poul Anderson, Tau Zero

“You simply do not understand the human condition,” said the robot.

Hah! Do you think you do, you conceited hunk of animated tin?”

Yes, I believe so, thanks ot my study of the authors, poets, and critics who devote their lives to the exploration and description of Man. Your Miss Forelle is a noble soul. Ever since I looked upon my first copy of that exquisitely sensitive literary quarterly she edits, I have failed to understand what she sees in you. To be sure,” IZK-99 mused, “the relationship is not unlike that between the nun and the Diesel engine in Regret for Two Doves, but still… At any rate, if Miss Forelle has finally told you to go soak your censored head in expurgated wastes and then put the unprintable thing in an improbable place, I for one heartily approve.

Tunny, who was no mamma’s boy — he had worked his way through college as a whale herder and bossed construction gangs on Mars — was so appalled by the robot’s language that he could only whisper, “She did not. She said nothing of the sort.”

I did not mean it literally,” IZK-99 explained. “I was only quoting the renunciation scene in Gently Come Twilight. By Stichling, you know — almost as sensitive a writer as Brochet.”
― Poul Anderson

“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...”
― Poul Anderson

“Heaven is not as narrowly literal-minded as hell.”
― Poul Anderson, Operation Chaos

“A man can do but little. Enough if that little be right.”
― Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time

“They talked business for half an hour. (Centuries passed beyond the hull.)”
― Poul Anderson, Tau Zero

“I'm only certain that nothing is forever. No matter how carefully you design a system, it will go bad and die.”
― Poul Anderson, Tau Zero

“Our own age is not one which can afford to call its ancestors savage.”
― Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword

“That,' he confessed aloud, 'was as ludicrous a case of mutual ineptitude as the gods of slapstick ever engineered. We both deserve to be tickled to death by small green centipedes. Well... if you keep quiet about it, I will.”
― Poul Anderson, Flandry of Terra

“I am told that our chroniclers' practice of inventing speeches for great persons whose lives they write is unscholarly.”
― Poul Anderson, The High Crusade

“The fact is, man has never stayed by a single ideal. The mass enthusiasm when you were young gave way to cool, rationalistic classicism. Today that’s being drowned in turn by a kind of neoromanticism. God knows where that will lead. I probably won’t approve. Regardless, new generations grow up. We’ve no right to freeze them into our own mold. The universe is too wide.”
― Poul Anderson, Tau Zero

“In the intricate and mutable space-time geometry at the black hole, in-falling matter and energy interacted with the virtualities of the vacuum in ways unknown to the flatter cosmos beyond it. Quasi-stable quantum states appeared, linked according to Schrodinger's wave functions and their own entanglement, more and more of them, intricacy compounding until it amounted to a set of codes. The uncertainty principle wrought mutations; variants perished or flourished; forms competed, cooperated, merged, divided, interacted; the patterns multiplied and diversified; at last, along one fork on a branch of the life tree, thought budded.
That life was not organic, animal and vegetable and lesser kingdoms, growing, breathing, drinking, eating, breeding, hunting, hiding; it kindled no fires and wielded no tools; from the beginning, it was a kind of oneness. An original unity differentiated itself into countless avatars, like waves on a sea. They arose and lived individually, coalesced when they chose by twos or threes or multitudes, reemerged as other than they had been, gave themselves and their experiences back to the underlying whole. Evolution, history, lives eerily resembled memes in organic minds.
Yet quantum life was not a series of shifting abstractions. Like the organic, it was in and of its environment. It acted to alter its quantum states and those around it: action that manifested itself as electronic, photonic, and nuclear events. Its domain was no more shadowy to it than ours is to us. It strove, it failed, it achieved. They were never sure aboardEnvoy whether they could suppose it loved, hated, yearned, mourned, rejoiced. The gap between was too wide for any language to bridge. Nevertheless they were convinced that it knew something they might as well call emotion, and that that included wondering.”
― Poul Anderson, Starfarers

“If nothing else, we today need a reminder that we must never take civilization for granted. I”
― Poul Anderson, Hrolf Kraki's Saga

“What else is life but always bidding farewell?”
― Poul Anderson, The Boat of a Million Years

“we can't go on ... having regular bowel movements ... while creation happens!”
― Poul Anderson, Tau Zero

“So softly you hear it now, Mary O’Meara, but soon it comes joyful and clear.
And soon in the shadow and dew of your hilltop a star-guided footfall rings near.
My only beloved, I’m here.”
― Poul Anderson, World without Stars

“Give me leave, lord, and I will be the best of your hounds – but if a dog be driven out, he will become a wolf and feed on his master’s flocks.”
― Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword

“for a moment infinitesimal and infinite, men, women, child, ship, and death were one. It”
― Poul Anderson, Tau Zero

“Cuando la vida se pierde, solo queda, para vosotros y vuestros hijos, lo que de vosotros se dice.”
― Poul Anderson

“I think you look on death as your friend,’ she murmured. ‘It is a strange friend for a young man to have.’ ‘The only faithful friend in all the world,’ he said bitterly. ‘Death is the only one sure to be at your side.”
― Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword

“sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?”
― Poul Anderson, Tau Zero

“Our species is gifted where it comes to interpreting doctrine so as to justify whatever one wants to do.”
― Poul Anderson, Orion Shall Rise

“Cynicism is boringly fashionable. I didn't think you would be afraid to say mankind is worth fighting for.”
― Poul Anderson, Young Flandry

“Poor old G.K.C.! It's too bad he didn't live to see the change. What paradoxes he would have dreamed up!”
― Poul Anderson, Brain Wave