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Samuel Delany Quotes & Sayings

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Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I read The NAMBLA Bulletin fairly regularly and I think it is one of the most intelligent discussions of sexuality I've ever found ... I would have been so much happier as an adolescent if NAMBLA had been around when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

stupidity: a process, not a state. A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. "Stupidity" is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information she or he puts out, commits him or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out. (Not to be confused with ignorance, or lack of data.) Since such a situation is impossible to achieve because of the nature of mind/perception itself in its relation to the functioning body, a continuing downward spiral of functionality and/or informative dissemination results,' and he understood why! 'The process, however, can be reversed,' the voice continued, 'at any time. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one kind of writer or another. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

It's easy to repeat; it's hard to speak, — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

In the cups, one after another, glistening disks rose, black without translucence. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

There are two types of codes, ciphers, and true codes. In the first, letters, or symbols that stand for letters, are shuffled and juggled according to a pattern. In the second, letters, words, or groups of words are replaced by other letters, symbols, or words. A code can be one type or the other, or a combination. But both have this in common: once you find the key, you just plug it in and out come logical sentences. A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning. At best you can get a close approximation. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn't black. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Reality must prove itself again and again to questioners ... it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete. When I blow across the mouthpiece in the handle, I make music with my blade. When all the holes are covered, the sound is sad, as rough as rough can be and be called smooth. When all the holes are open, the sound pipes about, bringing to the eye flakes of sun on water, crushed metal. There are twenty holes. And since I've been playing music, I've been called all different kinds of fool - more times than Lobey, which is my name. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

They were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.' Katin looked toward the front of the car.
The captain gazed through the curving plate that lapped the roof. His yellow eyes fixed Her consumptive light that pulsed fire-spots in a giant cinder. The light was so weak he did not squint at all.
I am confounded, Katin admitted to his jeweled box, 'nevertheless. The mirror of my observation turns and what first seemed gratuitous I see enough times to realize it is a habit. What I suspected as habit now seems part of a great design. While what I originally took as purpose explodes into gratuitousness. The mirror turns again, and the character I thought obsessed by purpose reveals his obsession is only habit; his habits are gratuitously meaningless; while those actions i construed as gratuitous now reveal a most demonic end. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

If you are angle, I am complement. If you are circle, I am circumscribed. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I am mad again, he thought. Tears brimmed. He swallowed in a tightened throat. I don't want to be. I'm tired, I'm tired and horny, I'm so tired I can't make sense out of any of it and my mind won't work right half the time I try. I'm thirsty. My head's all filled with kapok coffee wouldn't clear. Still, I wish I had some. Where am I going, what am I doing, stumbling in this smoking graveyard? It's not the pain; only that the pain keeps going on. He tried to let all his muscles go and stepped aimlessly from sidewalk to gutter, his mouth dryer and dryer and dryer. Well, he thought, if it hurts, it hurts. It's only pain. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Do they have this word, I?' "As a matter of fact they have three forms of it: I-below-a-temperature-of-six-degrees-centigrade, I-between-six-and-ninety-three-degrees-centigrade, and I-above-ninety-three." The Butcher looked confused. "It has to do with their reproductive process," Rydra explained. "When the temperature is below six degrees they're sterile. They can only conceive when the temperature is between six and ninety-three, but to actually give birth, they have to be above ninety-three. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

We're plotting to steal time itself from you ... We're going to spike it to the floor as it slips by. And just as you come over to see why it's so still, we'll pull it out from under you
and send you spinning off around the galaxy's edge. We're planning to pluck all the best stars out of the sky and stuff them in our pockets ... so that when we meet you once again and thrust our hands deep inside to hide our embarrassment, our fingertips will smart on them, as if they were desert grains, caught down in the seams, and we'll smile at you on your way to a glory that, for all our stellar thefts, we shall never be able to duplicate. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I'm not about either entertaining or instructing. The entertaining and instructing are secondary fallout from the fundamental thing, which is basically to create an aesthetic object. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Bear in mind that the novel
no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective
is always an historical projection of its own time. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Do you follow the wrestling? Most people think it's illegal, but you can watch it there. Ruby and Python are on display this evening. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

It's only ... when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Fiction
at least for me
requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Those moments when we learn that mothers rage and fathers kill, that friends betray and authority is fallible, or that our own blank, innocent ignorance can destroy the pure, the good, and the loved are moments the very memory of which constitutes the beginning of a strategy to live in a world where such horrors exist. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The fantasy/reality confusion ... it's just marvelous in her work. I mean, there, it's practically like what we do, the fantasy working as a sort of metalogic, with which she can solve real, aesthetic problems in the most incredible ways
I was actually in a few of her productions last year, a sort of ersatz member of the company. But finally I just had to get out. Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for whatever purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that's what is, as far as she's concerned. But then, I suppose ... ' Bron laughed at the ground, then looked up: they'd just left the Plaza
'that's the right we just fought a war to defend. But Audri, when someone abuses that right, it can make it pretty awful for the rest of us. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I pass beneath a fixed white line of trees where dry leaves lie for footsteps to dismember. They crackle with a muted sound like fear. That and the wind are all that I can hear. I ask cold air, "What is the word that frees?" The wind says, "Change," and the white sun, "Remember. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

It's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The sad truth is, S - , most people are not writers. This has nothing to do with literacy - or intelligence, or general culture. There are people who can correct the grammar, spelling, diction, and style of a college English paper with the best of them - who are still not writers. Indeed, most of what gets published in books, magazines, and newspapers is not written by real writers - which is one reason why so much of it is so bad. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Dictators during the entire history of this planet have used similar techniques. By not letting the people of their country know what conditions existed outside their boundaries, they could get the people to fight to stay in those conditions. It was the old adage: Convince a slave that he's free , and he will fight to maintain his slavery . — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I still believe pattern fascinates on its own. And three-sevenths of a pattern, or even a smaller fragment, can fascinate still more
get us really hunkering down, trying to tease out the whole of the figure in the carpet. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I think a 23-page ordinary comic is an investment for the artist, but if you're doing something 60 to 104 pages, that's a really big investment for an artist. So unless you've got someone who wants to pay you while you're doing it or up front, it's kind hard to get someone to do that with you, unless you're the artist yourself. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Suggestion is a literary strategy. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Lots of people do things lots better than lots of others; but, today, so many people do so many things very well, and so many people are seriously interested in so many different things people do for their own different reasons, you can't call any thing the best for every person, or even every serious person. So you just pay real attention to the real things that affect you; and don't waste your time knocking the rest. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the world's evils, only to find we've raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity! — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

All life is a rhythm," she said as I sat up. "All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life
resumes. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

A number of things in 'Dhalgren' are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

There is nothing left to watch but fire and the night: circle within circle, light within light. Messages arrive in the net where discrete pulses cross. Parametal engines of joy and disaster give them wave and motion. We interpret and defeat their terms by terminus. The night? What of it. It is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen,
constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

That seemed to be, if anything, the power of writing - to hold sway over memory, making it public, keeping it private, possibly, even, keeping it secret from oneself - — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Will sex between humans ever lose its endlessly repeated history? — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The father-mother-son that makes up the basic family unit, at least as the Family has described it for centuries now, represents a power structure, a structure of strong powers, mediating powers, and subordinate powers, as well as paths for power developments and power restrictions. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectators experience should be identical to, or have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The particular verbal freedom of SF, coupled with the corrective process that allows the whole range of the physically explainable universe, can produce the most violent leaps of imagery. For not only does it throw us worlds away, it specifies how we got there. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Shiftrunes?" "Letters that are pronounced one way on their first occurrence in a text, another on their second, another on their third, and so on in a fixed sequence. It gives the poet an interesting technique to exploit: she can have pairs of words that alliterate visually but not phonetically as well as pairs that alliterate phonetically but not visually. And she can play the two off against each other. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Since I spent eighteen years of my life as a child, and nine years of that life as a pretty sexually active gay child, my complaint against the current attitudes is that they work mightily to silence the voices of children first and secondarily ignore what adults have to say who have been through these situations. One size fits all is never the way to handle any situation with a human dimension. Many, many children-and I was one of them-are desperate to establish some sort of sexual relation with an older and even adult figure. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I grew up in Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand people lived in one city block. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is - which I'm a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

How we treat our invalids - our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members - does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

One of the more depressing things about reading your fiction 25 years later, or 10 years later, is you realize the only things going on are things you made go on. Strange and interesting and new and wonderful things don't happen. It's the book you wrote; that's all. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

He laughed. So you see, I'm not a nut. Not a real one, anyway. I haven't been a real nut in a long time. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Like contemporary poetry , philosophy is one of those things, especially at the beginning stages, most people would rather do than study which is why most of what gets done is so impoverished. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen. I don't need more intimations of disorder. It has to be more than that! Search the smoke for the fire's base. Read from the coals neither success nor despair. This edge of boredom is as bright. I pass it, into the dark rim. There is the deceiving warmth that asks nothing. There are objects lost in double-light. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts). — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

It's a beautiful universe ... wondrous and the more exciting because no one has written plays and poems and built sculptures to indicate the structure of desire I negotiate every day as I move about in it. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Each of us, with money, gets further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket
not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense-stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety-is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself ... in a way other people just can't. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The concept of a writer writing a vivid and accurate scene in a language transparent and devoid of decoration so that we see through to the object without writerly distraction suffers the same contradiction as the concept of a painter painting a vivid and accurate scene with pigments transparent and devoid of color, including white and black - so that the paint will not get between us and the picture. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

It is better to accept the inevitable with energy. Well then, if I have not chosen up till now, now I choose. That is freedom. Having chosen, I am free. Somewhere in my memory — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

He shrugged. Confusion was like struggling to find the proper way to sit inside his skin. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

In the arts, people are always waiting for someone or some movement to "fulfill her/its/his promise." Then, half-a-dozen or a dozen years on, others begin to realize that, really, something extraordinary was actually happening. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The yellow eyes had fallen from the tired star. Lorq's face erupted about the scar at some antic from the Mouse that Katin had missed.
Rage, Katin pondered. Rage. Yes, he is laughing. But how is anyone supposed to distinguish between laughter and rage in that face?
But the others were laughing too.
Yet some way, somehow, we do. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Ah, well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us for that. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I can think of no series of words that could appear in a piece of naturalistic fiction that could not also appear in the same order in a piece of speculative fiction. I can, however, think of many series of words that, while fine for speculative fiction, would be meaningless as naturalism. Which then is the major and which the subcategory? — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Desire isn't appeased by its object, only irritated into something more than desire that can join with the stars to inform the chaotic heavens with sense. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Bitch, on that world, was what men called women they were extremely fond of or extremely displeased with when the woman was not there. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there's so much of it, blaring in through the five senses. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I heard Bellona was where it was at. It must be, now. I'm here. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The pulp hero, though he may be a renegade, is a guy who doesn't feel. Anything. Ever. And for the adolescent male - pummeled by emotions left and right, whether arising from sexuality or resulting from his necessary encounters with authority - this hero is a blessing, a relief and a release. The world he lives in, where feelings are totally under control, looks to the adolescent boy like heaven! This hero's lack of feeling - like Star Trek's Spock - is what allows him to be a genius, or allows him to shoot the bad guys and/or aliens, without a quiver to his lip. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

And what have I invested in interpreting disfocus for chaos? This threat: the only lesson is to wait. I crouch in the smoggy terminus. The streets lose edges, the rims of thought flake. What have I set myself to fix in this dirty notebook that is not mine? Does the revelation that, though it cannot be done with words, it might be accomplished in some lingual gap, give me the right, in injury, walking with a woman and her dog in pain? Rather the long doubts: that this labor tears up the mind's moorings; that, though life may be important in the scheme, awareness is an imperfect tool with which to face it. To reflect is to fight away the sheets of silver, the carbonated distractions, the feeling that, somehow, a thumb is pressed on the right eye. This exhaustion melts what binds, releases what flows. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Most people here have spent most of their time someplace else. You learn — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Things have made you what you are," she recited "What you are will make you what you will become. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The idea that certain things in life - and in the universe - don't yield up their secrets is something that requires a slightly more mature reader to accept. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I wanted to get out, Vyme, to keep going and not be trapped, to be free ... only I was cruel. I had the chance to do it, and I took it. Why is that bad, Vyme? Unless, of course, that's what being free means. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

Truth provides the most diplomatic answer): I don't believe I've ever attended one since I was your age where I didn't feel, beforehand, an oppressive dread at the isolation that can reign in a large enough group of even the most intimate friends, much less an admixture of intimates, acquaintances, and strangers. Still, so much of my social education has been effected in such gatherings, so many true friendships have had their beginnings in meetings much like yours and mine, that I feel these affairs must not only be endured, but negotiated with a certain energy, if not commitment. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

The Family/Sygn conflict is in the process of creating a schism throughout the entire galaxy, concerning just what exactly a woman is. And it may mean that instead of one universe with six thousand worlds in it, we will have a universe with one group of some thousands of worlds and another group of some thousands of others, and no connection between the two save memories of murder, starvation, and violence. And in a situation like that, no, you do not just simply decide to up and change sides! — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

...in a universe where both information and misinformation are constantly suspect, reviewed and drifing as they must be (constantly) by and between the two, a moment when either information or misinformation turns out to be harmless must bloom, when surrounded by the workings of desire and terror, into the offered sign of all about it, making and marking all about it innocent by contamination. — Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes By Samuel R. Delany

I don't know whether Asimov realized he was saying this as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever look at you, read a word you write, or consider you in any situation, no matter whether the roof is falling in or the money is pouring in, without saying to him- or herself (whether in an attempt to count it or to discount it), 'Negro ... ' The racial situation, permeable as it might sometimes seem (and it is, yes, highly permeable), is nevertheless your total surround. Don't you ever forget it ... ! And I never have. — Samuel R. Delany