Poul Anderson on Life

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

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

"It was true. Men died and civilization died, but before they died they lived. It was not altogether futile."

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

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

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

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

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

"“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."

"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 cannot imagine how wearisome existence grows, alone and immortal."

"Man’s duty in this life, he thought, is to choose the lesser evil."

"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?"

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

"What else is life but always bidding farewell?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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..."