Top 100 Samuel R. Delany Quotes
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed.
Samuel R. Delany
#5. I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.
Samuel R. Delany
#6. 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
#7. How true,' returned the measured, featureless voice. 'I would chuckle in amused agreement, but the laughter switches of my translator have been malfunctioning for the past six hours. You understand.'
'Certainly,' I said. And somehow felt much more comfortable.
Samuel R. Delany
#8. No laws: to break, or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become-" [ ... ] "exactly who you are.
Samuel R. Delany
#9. 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
#10. Rydra, when I look at the night and stars, it is only a passive act, but you are active even watching, and halo the stars with more luminous flame.
Samuel R. Delany
#11. All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.
Samuel R. Delany
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. When what is is congruent to what is supposed, the reaction is functional and the mental processes competent. When what is and what is supposed have nothing to do with each other, the choice of reactions is random. Something tears.
Samuel R. Delany
#16. Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).
Samuel R. Delany
#17. I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.
Samuel R. Delany
#18. Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen.
Samuel R. Delany
#19. Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.
Samuel R. Delany
#20. Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind
vividly, forcefully ...
Samuel R. Delany
#21. To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.
Samuel R. Delany
#22. 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
#23. Do you know how hard it is to make a home? ... That's something that a woman does from inside herself. You do it in the face of all sorts of opposition. Husbands are very appreciative when it works out well. But they're not that anxious to help. It's understandable. They don't know how.
Samuel R. Delany
#24. My family trained me to be polite to people I had just met, and that included strangers. You speak when you're spoken to. You look people in the eye when they address you and when you address them back.
Samuel R. Delany
#25. I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
Samuel R. Delany
#26. 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
#30. Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.
Samuel R. Delany
#31. An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented . I am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. I am someone in that room; I am -
Samuel R. Delany
#32. 'You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land, while we ... ' She turned her head right, left, and her black hair curled and uncurled on the shoulder of her coat. 'We have our dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshiping you!'
Samuel R. Delany
#33. 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
#34. If you are angle, I am complement. If you are circle, I am circumscribed.
Samuel R. Delany
#35. You do not need an identity to become yourself; you need an identity to become -like- someone else.
Samuel R. Delany
#36. Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life.
Samuel R. Delany
#37. He shrugged. Confusion was like struggling to find the proper way to sit inside his skin.
Samuel R. Delany
#38. It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfections on to another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies.
Samuel R. Delany
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain.
Samuel R. Delany
#45. You are trapped in that bright moment where you learned your doom
Samuel R. Delany
#46. 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
#47. Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.
Samuel R. Delany
#48. Will sex between humans ever lose its endlessly repeated history?
Samuel R. Delany
#49. 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
#50. I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that's how people perceive me, they have to say I'm prolific. But I don't find that either complimentary or accurate.
Samuel R. Delany
#51. The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.
Samuel R. Delany
#52. 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
#54. 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
#55. The reason for privacy is not so that people will not know you go to the bathroom. It's to allow certain things to go on that you don't want other people to know about, when all is said and done. But the things I don't want other people to know about are not my sex life.
Samuel R. Delany
#56. Honesty is the best policy ; a policy is, after all, a strategy for living in the polis in the city ...
Samuel R. Delany
#57. And on the worlds of five galaxies, now, people delve your imagery and meaning for the answers to the riddles of language, love, and isolation. The three words jumped his sentence like vagabonds on a boxcar.
Samuel R. Delany
#58. Science fiction doesn't try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present ... We sit around and look at what we see around us and we say how can the world be different
Samuel R. Delany
#59. Down, everybody! Down on all fours! We're going to show you our new step! Like this: just swing your up and -
Samuel R. Delany
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 'Dhalgren' is the kind of book in which you can look for pretty much anything you want. I tried to put as much into it as I could at the time.
Samuel R. Delany
#64. You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city ... you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.
Samuel R. Delany
#65. As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
Samuel R. Delany
#66. Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.
Samuel R. Delany
#67. The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.
Samuel R. Delany
#68. 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
#72. 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
#73. Historically, I guess that's how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable - and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human.
Samuel R. Delany
#74. He stopped, because he wasn't sure what Cryptography had established, and because he needed another moment to haul himself down from the ledges of her high cheekbones, to retreat from the caves of her eyes.
Samuel R. Delany
#75. 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
#76. It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art.
Samuel R. Delany
#77. Most people here have spent most of their time someplace else. You learn
Samuel R. Delany
#78. 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
#79. Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently.
Samuel R. Delany
#80. Power is all. Another falsification; I do not tell how I gain or maintain it. I only record the ginger stroll through the vaguely fetid garden of its rewards.
Samuel R. Delany
#81. If people are busy living out myths you don't like, leave them to it.
Samuel R. Delany
#83. The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society's values, can force it to change.
Samuel R. Delany
#84. In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.
Samuel R. Delany
#86. Wind passed again; the iris shuddered about the diamond chip.
Samuel R. Delany
#87. 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
#88. I shall always be able to come up with new fantasies. As long as there are people walking around in the street, as long as I have books to read and windows to look out of, I'm not going to use them up.
Samuel R. Delany
#89. I do not say, however, that every delusion or wandering of the mind should be called madness. Erasmus of Rotterdam, The Praise of Folly There
Samuel R. Delany
#90. 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
#91. Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep.
Samuel R. Delany
#92. Human beings being what they are, order spreads, given half a chance, almost as fast as confusion.
Samuel R. Delany
#93. The strange machinery by which a reputation precedes its source we all know is faulty. Yet how much faith we put in it!
Samuel R. Delany
#94. It's only ... when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.
Samuel R. Delany
#96. You give me so much pleasure, why should I ever want to hurt you?
Samuel R. Delany
#97. 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
#99. Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.
Samuel R. Delany
#100. Presumptuous bastard,' Tak said. 'Sunset? He might at least wait and see if there's a tomorrow morning.
Samuel R. Delany
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