Poul is gone, now, more’s the pity – he was a neighbor of mine out here in California, and a friend for more than forty years – but his books live on, and I’m happy to see his lovely High Crusade coming into a new incarnation now. – Robert Silverberg, April 2010.

Ill is it when good folk die.’ ‘Why, if they were good you need not mourn for them,’ said Skafloc glibly, ’for they are safe from this world’s sorrows, come home to Him above. I should think, in truth, that only the sound of your weeping could trouble their bliss.

What had he been fighting when he fought the Nazis but a resurgence of archaic horrors that civilized men had once believed were safely dead? In.

I am told that our chroniclers’ practice of inventing speeches for great persons whose lives they write is unscholarly.

Happier are all men than the beings of faerie – or the gods, for that matter,’ he said. ‘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.

The same fight was being waged, here the Nazis and there the Middle World; but in both places, Chaos against Law, something old and wild and blind at war with man and the works of man.

Give me leave, lord, and I will be the best of your hounds – but if a dog be driven out, he will become a wolf and feed on his master’s flocks.

If nothing else, we today need a reminder that we must never take civilization for granted. I.

There is naught on which it does not bite, nor does it ever grow dull of edge. Venom is in the steel, and the wounds it gives cannot be healed by leechcraft or magic or prayer. Yet this is the curse on it: that every time it is drawn it must drink blood, and that in the end, somehow, it brings the bane of him who uses it’.

I’m only certain that nothing is forever. No matter how carefully you design a system, it will go bad and die.