Poul Anderson Quotes (140 quotes, page 2)

In the first edition of the book, this quote reads: 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.
Source: The Broken Sword (1954), Chapter 28 (p. 206)

“Keep on thinking. Keep your thinking close to the ground, where it belongs. Don’t ever trade your liberty for another man’s offer to do your thinking and make your mistakes for you.”

Poul Anderson book Brain Wave

Source: Brain Wave (1954), Chapter 3 (p. 25)

“He was no respecter of windy theories about inborn racial traits, but there was something to be said for traditions so ancient as to be unconscious and ineradicable.”

Poul Anderson

Delenda Est (p. 192)
Time Patrol

“I’ll give you one thing to mull over, though. If the body’s such a valueless piece of pork, and we’ll all meet each other in the sweet bye and bye, and so on, why’re you busting every gut you own to get back to your wife?”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 11 (p. 87)

““You are very honest about the situation of your own country.”
Deirdre said roughly, “Most of us won’t admit it, but I think it best to look truth in the eyes.””

Poul Anderson

Delenda Est (pp. 202-203)
Time Patrol

“For a space he faltered, when Goltan fell with a spear through him. “Now I am one friend poorer,” he said, “and that is a wealth not gained back.””

Poul Anderson book The Broken Sword

Source: The Broken Sword (1954), Chapter 10 (p. 65)

“Inland, all except criminals lived in a tightly pulled net of regulations, duties, social standing, tax collection, expectations of how to act and speak and think—“sort of like late twentieth-century USA” Everard grumbled to himself.”

Poul Anderson

Death and the Knight (p. 752)
Time Patrol

“Silence fell. The clock on my mantel ticked aloud and the wind outside flowed past like a river.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 16 (p. 175)

“A cultured, sensitive, observant man is a pleasure to be with in any age.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 9 (p. 97)

“The universe held as many surprises as it did stars. No, more. That was its glory. But someday one of them was bound to kill you.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 32 (p. 517)

“What’s the point of our living all these centuries if we haven’t grown up even a little?”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 27 (p. 482)

“Before the spirit could seek into it, the mind must. She studied the tensor equations as once she studied the sutras, she meditated upon the koans of science, and at last she began to feel her oneness with all that was, and in the vision find peace.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 18 (p. 449)

“I don’t pretend to understand what the physicists mean by time, but for people, it isn’t so-and-so many measured units; it’s events, experiences. A man who crowds his life and dies young has lived longer than one who got old sitting in tame sameness.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 14 (p. 441)

“We Russians have learned to fear anarchy above all else. We would rather have tyranny than it. Hanno, you do wrong to look on people’s republics, strong governments of every kind, as always evil. Freedom is perhaps better, but chaos is worse.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 15 (p. 396)

“Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ Yeah, trouble is, the three classes of people aren’t the same.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 336)

“Well, I’ll try to sketch it out for you, but I’ll have to repeat stuff I’ve told you before.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

“That’s all right. I’m a simon-pure layman. My basic thought habits were formed early in the Iron Age. Where it comes to science, I can use plenty of repetition.”
Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 331)

“It would annoy me less that we’re heading into a new puritanical era if the puritanism concerned itself about things that matter.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 330)

“No amount of money would stave off a nuclear warhead.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 328)

“Once this was a free country. Oh, I always knew that couldn’t last, that here too things were bound to grind back to the norm—masters and serfs, whatever names they go by. And so far we continue happier than most of the world ever was. But damn, modern democracy has the technology to regiment us beyond anything Caesar, Torquemada, Suleyman, or Louis XIV dared dream of.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 327)

“Well, everybody got stupid now and then, especially in war.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 17 “Steel” (p. 306)