Poul Anderson

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

“A man isn't really alive till he has something bigger than himself and his own little happiness, for which he'd gladly die.”

“Time is the bridge that always burns behind us.”

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

“Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.”

““Lord, that war was crazy!”“All wars are,” said Drummond dispassionately. “but technology advanced to the point of giving us a knife to cut our throats with. Before that, we were just beating our heads against the wall. Robinson, we can’t go back to the old ways. We’ve got to start on a new track—a track of sanity.””

“No, the only way to sanity—to survival—is to abandon class prejudice and race hate altogether, and work as individuals. We’re all...well, Earthlings, and subclassification is deadly. We all have to live together, and might as well make the best of it.”

““You were right. We should never have created science. It brought the twilight of the race.”“I never said that. The race brought its own destruction, through misuse of science. Our culture was scientific anyway, in all except its psychological basis. It’s up to us to take that last and hardest step. If we do, the race may yet survive.””

“One light-year is not much as galactic distances go. You could walk it in about 270 million years, beginning at the middle of the Permian Era, when dinosaurs belonged to the remote future, and continuing to the present day.”

““Don’t talk, you,” he said. “It hurts my ears. Nor think; that hurts your head.’””

“When facts are insufficient, theorizing is ridiculous at best, misleading at worst.”

“One can surrender one’s rational will to beliefs or habits as easily as to individuals, for essentially the same reasons, and with essentially the same results. Ideas have a mystery and power of their own.”

“Mystery is in a way the guarantee of the boundlessness of the might of the ruler: power bound to reason must always have limitations, great though it may be.”

“Anderson demonstrates that if one accepts a sham mystery as real, one has stopped or strayed in the search for truth, and truth has survival value.”

“Freedom brings responsibility and often guilt. It may indeed provide a deeper satisfaction and a richer life, but the evaluation of such rewards is a distressingly subjective process. Perhaps no argument in favor of liberty can satisfy the intellect; perhaps the best we can hope for is a shared emotional conviction.”

“Let’s stop making wild guesses and start gathering data.”

“Iskilip is senile, more than half converted to his own artificial creed. He was mumbling about prophecies Val Nira made long ago, true prophecies. Bah! Tricks of memory and wishfulness.”

“You can’t be a telepath and remain any kind of prude. People’s lives were their own business, if they didn’t hurt anyone else too badly.”

“So why was a civilian going armed? It bespoke a degree of lawlessness that fitted ill with a technological society.”

“I think most human misery is due to well-meaning fanatics like him.”

“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.”

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

“Everard was not so sure; he had seen enough human misery in all the ages. You got case-hardened after a while, but down underneath, when a peasant stared at you with sick brutalized eyes, or a soldier screamed with a pike through him, or a city went up in radioactive flame, something wept. He could understand the fanatics who had tried to change events. It was only that their work was so unlikely to make anything better...”

“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.”

““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.””

“Everard sighed, switched off his conscience, and began lying.”

“Say on. If you are a rogue, you are at least an interesting one.”

“Like sensible people throughout history, the average Phoenician wanted as little to do with his government as possible.”

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

“We must understand that what Pascal said is true of every human being in the whole of space-time, ourselves included—“The last act is tragic, however pleasant all the comedy of the other acts. A little earth on our heads, and all is done with forever.”—understand it in our bones, so that we can live with it calmly if not serenely.”

“What I’m trying to make you know, not in your forebrain but in your marrow, is that reality never conforms very well to the textbooks, and sometimes it doesn’t conform at all.”

“Here was more than a question of law; it was a matter of whose will should prevail.”

“Know that against time the gods themselves are powerless.”

“I cannot believe you harbor any illusions about the barbarians being nature’s noblemen. I soon lost mine. They were every bit as ruthless. They were simply less efficient.”

“Sincerity is the most overrated virtue in the catalogue.”

“What I want is to commune with the land. In company I couldn’t admit that. It’d sound too pompous, as though I were from Greenpeace or the People’s Republic of Berkeley.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And ninety-nine percent 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. We’re just built that way.”

“The end of the world—was the sky going to open up, would the angels pour down the vials of wrath on a shaking land, and would God appear to judge the sons of men? He listened for the noise of great galloping hoofs, but there was only the wind in the trees.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.”

“A little careful pushing, and they’ll bury the hatchet all right—in each other.”

“The city was breaking state and national laws every day—it had to—and the governor was outraged. He wanted to bring the whole state back under his own authority. It wasn’t an unreasonable wish, but the times weren’t ripe; and when they eventually were, the old forms of government would be no more important than the difference between Homoousian and Homoiousian. But it was going to take a lot of argument to convince the Albany man of that.”

“Too far a retreat from reality is insanity.”

““You have to have some kind of morality,” he said.“Sure. Like you have to have motives for doing anything at all. Still, I think we’re beyond that smug sort of code which proclaimed crusades and burned heretics and threw dissenters into concentration camps. We need more personal and less public honor.””

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

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

“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.””

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

“Over unforced love, the gods themselves had no might.”

“I say that a God who would come between two who have been to each other what we have been, is not one I would heed.”

““I think you look on death as your friend,” she murmured. “That is a strange friend for a young man to have.”“The only faithful friend in this world,” he said. “Death is always sure to be at your side.””

“’Tis colder outside than a well-born maiden’s heart.”

“She rarely saw priest—and knowing her heart sinned, was glad of that. Dreary was a church after the woodlands and hills and sounding sea. She still loved God—and was not the earth His work, and a church only man’s?—but she could not bring herself to call on Him very often.”

“Better a life like a falling star, bright across the dark, than a deathlessness which can see naught above or beyond itself.”

“People usually take for granted that the way things are is the way things must be.”

“Then they died.And other men came after them. Wars flamed up and burned out; the howling peoples dwelt in smashed cities and kindled their fires with books.”

“Her rank was higher than his, so high that no one in her family worked productively.”

“Winter lay among the Outer Hebrides. Day was a sullen glimmer between two darknesses, often smothered in snow. When it did not fling itself upon the rocks and burst in freezing spume, the North Atlantic rolled in heavy and gnawing. There was no real horizon; leaden waves met leaden sky and misty leaden light hid the seam.”

“I do not think the coerced mind ever really learns an art.”

“Pioneering is an unlimited chance to become the biggest frog, provided the puddle is small enough.”

“Hard to say whether personal immortality would be a good thing or not. Not for the masses, surely! Too many of them as it was. But a select few, like Terangi Maclaren—or was it worth the trouble? Even given boats, chess, music, the No Drama, beautiful women and beautiful spectroscopes, life could get heavy.”

“Life was too short for anything but amusement at the human race.”

““Do you know,” said Maclaren, “there is one sin which is punished with unfailing certainty, and must therefore be the deadliest sin in all time. Stupidity.””

“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?”

“Li-Tsung of Krasna would have told him to live at all costs, sacrifice all the others, to save himself for his planet and the Fellowship. But there were limits. You didn’t have to accept Dave’s Calvinism—though its unmerciful God seemed very near this dead star—to swallow the truth that some things were more important than survival. Than even the survival of a cause.Maybe I’m trying to find out what those things are, he thought confusedly.”

“You can have more adventure in an hour’s walk through a forest than in a year on a spaceship.”

“I’m afraid I’m not a convert or anything. I still see the same blind cosmos governed by the same blind laws. But suddenly it matters. It matters terribly, and means something. What, I haven’t figured out yet. I probably never will. But I have a reason for living, or for dying if need be. Maybe that’s the whole purpose of life: purpose itself. I can’t say. But I expect to enjoy the world a lot more.”

““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.””

““Your son was in your own tradition.”“Better, I hope,” said the old man. “There would be little sense to existence, did boys have no chance to be more than their fathers.””

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

“It was lonely, not even knowing yourself.”

““You are much too kind,” said Holger, overwhelmed.“Nay.” Alfric waved his hand. “You mortals know not how tedious undying life can become, and how gladly a challenge such as this is greeted. ’Tis I should thank you.””

“Holger wished he had read the old tales more closely; he had only a dim childhood recollection of them.”

“They were not plagued that night, which Hugi said was without doubt because something worse was being prepared. Holger was inclined to share the dwarf’s pessimism.”

“As evil waxes, the very men who stand for good will in their fear use ever worse means o’ fighting, and thereby give evil a free beachhead.”

““But your sign says you can conjure up ever-filled purses,” Holger began.“Advertising,” Martinus admitted. “Corroborative detail intended to lend artistic verisimilitude.””

“You cannot imagine how wearisome existence grows, alone and immortal.”

““My mother taught me a Spanish saying,” he remarked, “that it takes four men to make a salad: a spendthrift for the oil, a philosopher for the seasonings, a miser for the vinegar, and a madman for the tossing.””

“Heim ignored the mob scene on the 3V, rested his eyes on the cold serenity of the Milky Way and thought that this, at least, would endure.”

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

“He’d seen too often how little of the universe is designed for man to neglect any safety measure.”

“The last thing any sane person wants is a jihad.”

“There really wasn’t much in a man’s life that mattered. But those few things mattered terribly.”

“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?”

““Are you that afraid to die?”“No. I simply like to live.””

“What’s to explain? I’ve scant use for those types whose chief interest is their grubby little personal neuroses. Not in a universe as rich as this.”

“We're mortal - which is to say, we're ignorant, stupid, and sinful - but those are only handicaps. Our pride is that nevertheless, now and then, we do our best. A few times we succeed. What more dare we ask for?”

“Don’t get me wrong. These people are mine. I like and in many ways admire them. They’re the salt of the earth. It’s simply that I want other condiments too.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One man, one vote: A legal doctrine requiring that, from time to time, old gerrymanders be replaced with new ones. The object of this is the achievement of genuine democracy.”

“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.”

““We need a reserve of life, every kind of life,” he explained. “Today for the spirit—a glimpse of space and green. Tomorrow for survival, flat-out survival.””

“The air was cold and smelled of earth. Birds twittered. “Beyond one or two hundred years back,” Havig once said to me, “the daytime sky is always full of wings.””

““If anything does change man,” he said, “it’s science and technology. Just think about the fact—while it lasts—that parents need not take for granted some of their babies will die. You get a completely different concept of what a child is.””

““I really liked that girl.”“N-n-no. I supposed not. Though what is love, anyway? Doesn’t it have so infinitely many kinds and degrees and mutations and quantum jumps that— Never mind.””

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

“His conscience must have gotten tired of nagging him and delivered an ultimatum.”

“Mortal combat corrupts, and war corrupts absolutely.”

“The old man murmured: “Aye, we draw to an end. Dying hurts. Nonetheless the forefathers were wise who in their myths made Nan coequal with Lesu. A thing which endured forever would become unendurable. Death opens a way, for peoples as well as for people.””

“Be calm. A man can do but little. Enough if that little be right.”

“Did ignorance save his freedom, or merely his illusion of freedom?”

“Look, these were none of them supermen. In fact, they were either weaklings who’d been assigned civilian-type jobs, or warriors as ignorant and superstitious as brutal. Aside from what specialized training fitted them for Wallis’s purposes, he’d never tried to get them properly educated. If nothing else, that might have led to questioning of his righteousness and infallibility.”

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

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

““He says giants built it in the morning of the world,” Hanno told Pytheas.“Then his people are as ignorant as we,” the Greek said low.”

“What else is life but always bidding farewell?”

“We can hardly expect conventional respectability of a person whose goal in life is enlightenment.”

“Nothing in excess, including self-denial.”

“He did not share the widespread present-day faith in astrology. It seemed likeliest to him that sheer accident ruled the world.”

“That is forgotten, their wars and their deeds and their very speech. Wisdom lasts. It is what I have sought across the world.”

“I heard too many answers, I met too many gods. Abroad they call on Christ, but if you fare southward long enough it is Muhammad; and eastward it is Gautama Buddha, save where they say the world is a dream of Brahm, or offer to a host of gods and ghosts and elves like ours in these Northlands. And almost every man I asked told me that his folk know the truth while the rest are benighted. Could I but hear a word I felt even half sure of—”

“He had intended to say that such was the nature of power. Seizing it and holding it were alike filthy.”

“I have learned much in two thousand years, but nothing about any gods, except that they too, arise, change, age, and die. Whatever there is beyond the universe, if anything, I doubt it concerns itself with us.”

“If you continue a liar, you are as skillful a one as I have found in a wide experience.”

“You shall depart freely. Caution enjoins me to have you arrested and garroted within this hour. Either you are a charlatan and deserve it or a mortal danger and require it. However, I deem you a sensible man who will withdraw to his obscurity. And I am grateful to you for a fascinating glimpse of—what is best left alone.”

““Your Eminence is as great a man as I have ever met.”“Then God have mercy on humankind,” Richelieu replied.”

“I also know you cannot pick and choose. Change is a medicine bundle. You must refuse it altogether, or take the whole thing.”

“Who can make a medicine against time?”

“I never set myself up as a prophet. Those crazy preachers have been the death of thousands, and the end is not yet.”

“I’ve seen so many gods come and go, what’s one more?”

“She seldom bothered taking revenge. Time did that for her, eventually.”

“Think. You have had your dealings with our bureaucracy. It is impossible not to, especially if one is a foreigner. Believe me, when we set our minds to it we can tangle, obstruct, and bring to a dead halt a herd of stampeding elephants.”

“I seek occasional relief in old books. They help me tell the transient from the enduring.”

“Corruption rewards its favorites with jobs.”

““Is that all he wants?” McCready wondered. “Shuffling papers in an office, forever?””

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“Something as biologically fundamental as death ought to be in the very fabric of evolution virtually from the beginning.”

““Evolution is cut-and-try. If I may anthropomorphize,” he added. “Often it’s hard not to.””

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

“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.”

“Absolute proof of absolute knowledge is impossible.”

“Are you happy?Your question is meaningless. I am occupied. I participate in operations, I am one with the accomplishments.”

““We do need something to lift us out of ourselves. It’s wrong to carry our pettinesses along to the stars.”“We will, though,” he said. “We can’t help it. How do you escape being what you are?””

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I've heard assorted rhapsodies about humankind going to the stars, of course. Who hasn't? Each of them founders on the practical problems." "The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems.”

“Light fills the air, wind is aglow, drink of it, breathe of it, make leafing. Lie still, molder away, then be again grass.”

“Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.”

“All those agonizing philosophical-theological conundrums amount to "Ask a silly question, get a silly answer."”

“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.”

“In Harvest of Stars, there is this notion, not original with me of course, that it will become possible to download at least the basic aspects of a human personality into a machine program...”

“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...”