Poul Anderson on Time

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Time is the bridge that always burns behind us."

"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."

"Who can make a medicine against time?"

"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."

"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..."

"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."

"We, the proper civil government, approved your defense measures of the past several years, though you are aware that I myself always considered them excessive. When I think of the prosperity that tax money, those resources, could have brought, left in private hands—or the social good it could have done in the public sector— Give you military your heads, and you’d build bases in the fourth dimension to protect us against an invasion from the future."