Poul Anderson - Collected Quotes

*He was well on the way to inventing differential calculus when his mother called him down to breakfast." (Poul Anderson, "Brain Wave", 1954)

"No one person can change a whole culture." (Poul Anderson, "Ghetto", 1954)

"Memory is not a passive filing cabinet, but a continuous process beneath the level of consciousness; in a way, you are always reliving your entire past." (Poul Anderson, "Journeys End", 1957)

"Time is the bridge that always burns behind us." (Poul Anderson, "The Burning Bridge", 1960)

"We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?" (Poul Anderson, "The Fatal Fulfillment", 1970

"Homo can truly be called sapiens when he practices his specialty of being unspecialized. His repeated attempts to freeze himself into an all-answering pattern or culture or ideology, or whatever he has named it, have repeatedly brought ruin. Give him the pragmatic business of making his living, and he will usually do rather well. He adapts, within broad limits." (Poul Anderson, "The Queen of Air and Darkness", 1971)

"The best foundation that a decision is ever allowed is our fallible assessment of the probabilities." (Poul Anderson, "The People of the Wind", 1973)

"The fact is that thresholds exist throughout reality, and that things on their far sides are altogether different from things on their hither sides." (Poul Anderson, "The Saturn Game", 1981)

"Absolute proof of absolute knowledge is impossible." (Poul Anderson, "The Boat of a Million Years" 1989)

"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, "The Boat of a Million Years" 1989)

"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, "The Boat of a Million Years" 1989)