Quotes from Poul Anderson

Yeah, it was fun at first, the novelty, the jobs, and then travelling around, but what are now except tourists once in a while when his high and mightiness Nansen lets us go?

No!" Ellen almost screamed. Chung sagged in his chair. "We're very neatly trapped," he said like an old man. "I don't see any way out. Think you can get to

I've already informed a number of my men. They're as mad as I am. They're waiting in the terminal. A monkey wrench or a laser torch makes a pretty fair weapon. We can take over by force.

Pero amigo, aprendiste historia en una escuela anglófona, y España fue durante siglos rival de Inglaterra. La propaganda del conflicto sigue ahí. La verdad es que los españoles, con Inquisición y todo, no eran peores que cualquiera en su propia época, y mejores que muchos.

The single definition of government I've ever seen that makes sense is that it's the organization which claims the right to kill people who won't do what it wants.

Elves know friendship, if not love, and I would fain see that done which would have gladdened him.

That was the trouble with war. Leave out the toil, discipline, discomfort, scant sleep, lousy food, monotony, and combat, and war would be a fine institution.

Their roaring machines filled the silence of their own deserts, gouged the quiet face of their own moon, shook the planets with a senseless fury of meaningless energy. They were the conquerors, and it never occurred to them that an ancient peace and stillness could be worth preserving.

Monstrosities could be slain; but first they must be understood

Il mondo è solo carne che si va putrefacendo su un teschio- mormorò la troll

That was the worst of it. The sky didn't care. The Earth went on turning through an endlessness of dark and silence, and what happened in the thin scum seething over its crust didn't matter.

Their spells would bounce like billiard balls off anyone in a state of grace; simply the usual modicum of decency and determination would get a man through.

A fanatic is a man who, when he's lost sight of his purpose, redoubles his effort.

I've yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way didn't become still more complicated.

Two lives met across death and centuries. To ask what it meant is meaningless. There is no destiny. But sometimes there is bravery

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.

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

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.

Their flight was not less exhilarating for being explainable.

Heaven is not as narrowly literal-minded as hell.

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...

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.

A man can do but little. Enough if that little be right.

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.