Poul Anderson: Trending quotes

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Poul Anderson: 280 quotes0 likes

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

Source: Harvest of Stars

“On our Earth, we’ve perforce learned all the knavery there is to know.”

Poul Anderson book The High Crusade

Source: The High Crusade (1960), p. 131

“I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on… It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.”

Poul Anderson: Fifty Years of Science Fiction (1997)

““Do you actually hope to convert the whole of mankind?”
“Belay that! Anyhow, if you mean, Do we hope to make everybody into copies of us? The answer is, No. Mind, I’m not in Parliament or Admiralty, but I follow debates and I read the philosophers. One trouble with the old machine culture was that, by its nature, it did force people to become more and more alike. Not only did this fail in the end—disastrously—but to the extent it succeeded, it was a worse disaster.” Lohannaso smote the rail with a mighty fist. “Damnation, Thomas! We need all the diversity, all the assorted ways of living and looking and thinking, we can get!””

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 11 (p. 119)

“Hurry and hurry, autumn leaves hurrying on the rainy wind, snow hurrying out of the sky, life hurrying to death, gods hurrying to oblivion.”

Poul Anderson book The Broken Sword

Source: The Broken Sword (1954), Chapter 3 (p. 9)

“Men, whose span is cruelly short, rush nonetheless to death in their youth as to a maiden’s arms.”

Poul Anderson book The Broken Sword

Source: The Broken Sword (1954), Chapter 10 (p. 55)

“As related, the bank was one of those eastern ones, with Roman pillars and cathedral dimness and, I suspect, a piece of Plymouth Rock in a reliquary.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 5 (p. 52)

“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.”

Source: Harvest of Stars (1993), Ch. 55

“Life isn’t a fairy tale; the knight who kills the dragon doesn’t necessarily get the princess. So what? Who’d want to live in a cosmos less rich and various than the real one?”

Poul Anderson book The Star Fox

Section 3 “Admiralty”, Chapter X (p. 207)
The Star Fox (1965)

“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: Fifty Years of Science Fiction (1997)

“You know what they say about bold spacemen never becoming old spacemen.”

"Garden in the Void" (1952)
Short fiction

““At least we can put a little sense into life.”
“I don’t know whether we do or whether we find what was always there,” he replied. “Nor do I care greatly. To me, the important thing is that the purpose—order, beauty, spirit, whatever you want to call it—does exist.””

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 18 (p. 148)

“You should pay no heed to what some yokel priest has prated of. What does he know?”

Poul Anderson book The Broken Sword

Source: The Broken Sword (1954), Chapter 11 (p. 70)

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

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 16 (p. 176; closing words)

“Another irritating thing about Naqsans was their habit of solemnly repeating the obvious. In that respect they were almost as bad as humans.”

Poul Anderson book The Star Fox

Section 2 “Arsenal Port”, Chapter III (p. 90)
The Star Fox (1965)

“We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?”

"The Fatal Fulfillment" (Short Story), March 1970. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Short fiction

“For himself, he had never thought it would be this bad. He had stopped remembering her, except maybe ten times a day, but now she came to him and the forgetting would have to be done all over again.”

Brave To Be a King (p. 63)
Time Patrol

“I’m still spry, but I feel the teeth gnawing, and believe me, my friends, it was better to be young.”

Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks (p. 314)
Time Patrol

“Man does not live by bread alone, nor guns, paperwork, theses, naked practicalities.”

Gibraltar Falls (p. 118)
Time Patrol

“Missile: A self-contained device which delivers high explosives from the air, condemned because of its effects upon women, children, the aged, the sick, and other non-combatants, unless these happen to have resided in Saigon, Da Nang, Hué, etc. Cf. bombing.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Variant: Bombing: A method of warfare which delivers high explosives from the air, condemned because of its effects upon women, children, the aged, the sick, and other non-combatants, unless these happen to have resided in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Osaka, etc., though not Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Cf. missile.
Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 3 (p. 30)