Top 100 Delany Quotes
#1. Their story, as the Delany sisters like to say, is not meant as "black" or "women's" history, but American history. It belongs to all of us. (From the Preface of "Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years)
Amy Hill Hearth
#2. Life is short, and it's up to you to make it sweet.
Sarah L. (Sadie) Delany
Amy Hill Hearth
#3. When people ask me how we've lived past one hundred, I say, 'Honey, we never married. We never had husbands to worry us to death!
A. Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany
Amy Hill Hearth
#4. In a new issue of Esquire magazine, they revealed that before he was married to Teresa Heinz, Senator John Kerry dated Morgan Fairchild, Michelle Phillips, Catherine Oxenberg and Dana Delany. Finally a Democratic presidential candidate with good taste in women.
Jay Leno
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed.
Samuel R. Delany
#10. They were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice.
Samuel R. Delany
#11. Time was short, as Pietr so frequently reminded me. Maybe we all needed to live fiercely.
And love courageously.
Shannon Delany
#12. Television is more of a business. You can't take as many risks, because there's so many channels now, and the advertising's dropping.
Dana Delany
#13. As long as you can see each day as a chance for something new to hapen, something you never experienced before, you'll stay young.
Sarah L. Delany
#14. I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.
Samuel R. Delany
#15. A serpent is a serpent, and none the less a viper, because it is nestled in the bosom of an honest-hearted man.
Martin Delany
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. Let us have an education, that shall practically develop our thinking faculties and manhood; and then, and only then, shall we be able to vie with our oppressors, go where we may ...
Martin Delany
#20. In Europe the parents are included as with children. All three generations are together. I'm thinking of Italy. You go out on a Sunday afternoon and the whole family is there.
Dana Delany
#21. You know, considering your IQ, you're really socially retarded sometimes.
Shannon Delany
#22. 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
#23. Every people should be the originators of their own destiny, the projectors of their own schemes, and creators of the events that lead to their destiny
the consummation of their own desires.
Martin Delany
#24. 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
#25. Free will. It sucks because it means we're responsible for our actions. There is no destiny, just difficult decisions.
Shannon Delany
#26. I thought I could change the world. It took me a hundred years to figure out I can't change the world. I can only change Bessie. And honey, that ain't easy either.
A. Elizabeth Delany
#27. I wonder sometimes if the purpose of the artistic community isn't to provide a concerned social matrix which simultaneously assures that no member, regardless of honors or approbation, has the slightest idea of the worth of his own work." Kidd
Samuel R. Delany
#28. There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.
Samuel R. Delany
#29. 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
#30. 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
#32. Things have made you what you are," she recited "What you are will make you what you will become.
Samuel R. Delany
#33. Now, though, I must rent a movie."
"You're going to do that?"
"Of course. I'm a werewolf, not a cretin. We have Blockbuster cards."
It blew my mind. Werewolfs rented DVDs. At my local Blockbuster.
Shannon Delany
#34. And what do you leave behind? ... Who do you leave with only memories of you? How many hearts do you break when you risk too much and die too young?
Shannon Delany
#35. In the cups, one after another, glistening disks rose, black without translucence.
Samuel R. Delany
#36. There is so little time. We need to make every moment count.
Shannon Delany
#37. 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
#38. We must make an issue, create an event, and establish a national position for ourselves: and never may expect to be respected as men and women, until we have undertaken some fearless, bold, and adventurous deeds of daring ...
Martin Delany
#39. It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.
Samuel R. Delany
#40. Some moments I believed Max could've easily been Red Riding Hood's wolf. But she probably would have liked it.
Shannon Delany
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful
though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.
Samuel R. Delany
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).
Samuel R. Delany
#47. I think I would make a good spy. I can sort of be a chameleon. People don't notice me very easily. I never get recognized.
Dana Delany
#48. Max,' I said, looking up at him, 'I love the Russian heritage you guys are so willing to share, but I'm not so thrilled with the French.'
'What?' His brows lowered. 'We're not French.'
'Great. So the next time you feel the need to kiss me, keep your tongue out of my mouth!
Shannon Delany
#49. 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
#50. The claims of no people, according to established policy and usage, are respected by any nation, until they are presented in a national capacity.
Martin Delany
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. I love being on stage or in front of the camera. My work brings me a lot of joy. It helps me figure out who I am. I'm really lucky that I get to make a living at acting.
Dana Delany
#54. 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
#55. To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.
Samuel R. Delany
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
Samuel R. Delany
#61. Turning one hundred was the worst birthday of my life. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Turning 101 was not so bad. Once you're past that century mark, it's just not as shocking.
Annie Elizabeth Delany
#62. I'm a werewolf, not a cretin. We have Blockbuster cards.
Shannon Delany
#63. I am not in favor of caste, nor separation of the brotherhood of mankind, and would as willingly live among white men as Black, if I had equal possession and enjoyment of privileges, but I shall never be reconciled living among them subservient to their will.
Martin Delany
#64. 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
#68. Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.
Samuel R. Delany
#69. 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
#70. '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
#71. Once in a while, God sends a good white person my way, even to this day. I think it's God's way of keeping me from becoming too mean. And when he sends a nice one to me, then I have to eat crow. And honey, crow is a tough old bird to eat, let me tell you.
Annie Elizabeth Delany
#72. 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
#73. If you are angle, I am complement. If you are circle, I am circumscribed.
Samuel R. Delany
#74. If you put Willem Dafoe, Liam Neeson and James Woods in a room together, there wouldn't be room for anyone else.
Dana Delany
#75. You do not need an identity to become yourself; you need an identity to become -like- someone else.
Samuel R. Delany
#76. Because feelings, emotional and physical, are so foregrounded in sexual encounters, the orgy is soon the most social of human interchanges, where awareness and communication, whether verbal or no, hold all together or sunder it.
Samuel R. Delany
#77. Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life.
Samuel R. Delany
#78. Remember that you create your world. It's not what happens to you, but how you choose to deal with it.
Dana Delany
#79. Our elevation must be the result of self-efforts and work of our own hands. No other human power can accomplish it. If we but determine it shall be so, it will be so.
Martin Delany
#80. He shrugged. Confusion was like struggling to find the proper way to sit inside his skin.
Samuel R. Delany
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. To be sure, the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, even when it takes you through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Just watch out for parasites.
Samuel R. Delany
#85. [My mother told me:] "You must decide whether you want to get married someday, or have a career." ... I set my sights on the career. I thought, what does any man really have to offer me?
Annie Elizabeth Delany
#86. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain.
Samuel R. Delany
#91. You are trapped in that bright moment where you learned your doom
Samuel R. Delany
#93. 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
#94. Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.
Samuel R. Delany
#95. I like people who are still actively creating in their life, who aren't set, I don't feel like I'm set. And I don't have any baggage, for better or worse. I don't have any plants or pets or kids. I can lock the door and go. I need to be with somebody for whom that's okay.
Dana Delany
#96. Will sex between humans ever lose its endlessly repeated history?
Samuel R. Delany
#97. So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The indark answered with wind.
Samuel R. Delany
#98. 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
#99. The rights of no oppressed people have ever yet been obtained by a voluntary act of justice on the part of the oppressors.
Martin Delany
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