Quotes from Poul Anderson

Poul is gone, now, more's the pity — he was a neighbor of mine out here in California, and a friend for more than forty years — but his books live on, and I'm happy to see his lovely High Crusade coming into a new incarnation now. —Robert Silverberg, April 2010

Better a life like a falling star, brief and bright across the dark, than the long, long waiting of the immortals, loveless and cheerlessly wise.

Momentarily a wing of zodiacal radiance could be seen, like a halo over the rising fire-disk.

Who can we trust with a monopoly of the planet killer weapons and unlimited powers of inspection and arrest? Why, a country big and modern enough to make peace-keeping a major industry; but not big enough to conquer anyone else or force its will on anyone without the support of a majority of nations; and reasonably well thought of by everyone. In short, Sweden.

Ill is it when good folk die.' 'Why, if they were good you need not mourn for them,' said Skafloc glibly, 'for they are safe from this world's sorrows, come home to Him above. I should think, in truth, that only the sound of your weeping could trouble their bliss.

How much of what we dismiss today may have been based on fragmentary observation, centuries ago, before the very existence of a scientific framework began to condition what facts we would and would not discover?

it was not hard to write the equations for an infinity of such parallel worlds. By logical necessity the laws of nature would vary from one to another. Therefore, somewhere in the boundlessness of reality, anything you can imagine must actually exist! Holger

Our species is gifted where it comes to interpreting doctrine so as to justify whatever one wants to do.

I'll have to jump around like sodium in the rain.

I'll often fail; but never willingly.

There is no other road than the one we take, hard though it be. And no man outlives his weird. Best to meet it bravely, face to face.

The trouble of the Wersgorix was that they had gone too far. They had made combat on the ground obsolete, and were ill trained, ill equipped, when it happened. True, they possessed fire-beams, as well as force shields to stop those same fire-beams. But they had never thought to lay down caltrops.

But a universal state is not a new beginning for a civilization, it's the start of the death, and it has to follow the same course over and over through history, like a kind of slow but terminal sickness.

As he grew up, he had much attention from the supernally lovely elf women. Without gods, and with few children, the elves know not marriage, but their nature was such that their women had more wish of love and their men less than among humans. Thus Skafloc found himself in great favor, and many a good time did he have in the light nights of summer.

Three things have I never known,' he boasted once. 'Fear, and defeat, and love-sickness.' Imric looked at him strangely. 'Young are you,' he murmured, 'not to have known the three ultimates of human life.

The interesting thing is that Poul's novel seems just as fresh and brisk and lively today as it did to those of us, grizzled gray-beards now, who pounced on it when it made its first appearance in Analog.

Many things end tonight,' quoth Valgard, 'and your life is one.

Cynicism is boringly fashionable. I didn't think you would be afraid to say mankind is worth fighting for.

CHAPTER I Archbishop William, a most learned and holy prelate, having commanded me to put into English writing those great events to which I was a humble witness, I take up my quill in the name of the Lord and my patron saint: trusting that they will aid my feeble powers of narrative for the sake of future generations who may with profit study the account of Sir Roger de Tourneville's campaign and learn thereby fervently to reverence the great God by whom all things are brought to pass.

she'd say there must be something in Leviticus against mixing so many metaphors.

There is naught on which it does not bite, nor does it ever grow dull of edge. Venom is in the steel, and the wounds it gives cannot be healed by leechcraft or magic or prayer. Yet this is the curse on it: that every time it is drawn it must drink blood, and that in the end, somehow, it brings the bane of him who uses it'.

But we must have something beyond survival to live for, or we shall not survive.

As he spurred his horse, he had a sudden instant when he saw a hawk rising up toward the moon. The chill struck deep into his bones, and he knew he had seen his own fetch.

Happier are all men than the beings of faerie – or the gods, for that matter,' he said. 'Better a life like a falling star, brief and bright across the dark, than the long, long waiting of the immortals, loveless and cheerlessly wise.