Top 100 Samuel Delany Quotes

#1. The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #6708
#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

Samuel Delany Quotes #10005
#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

Samuel Delany Quotes #12920
#4. 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 #19259
#5. Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #55257
#6. 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 #65575
#7. I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #125291
#8. 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 #163904
#9. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #170642
#10. It's easy to repeat; it's hard to speak,

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #171189
#11. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #195315
#12. 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 #230579
#13. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #249042
#14. 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 #250537
#15. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #257292
#16. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #258121
#17. 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 #282170
#18. In the cups, one after another, glistening disks rose, black without translucence.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #329610
#19. 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 #341245
#20. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #352759
#21. 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 #360589
#22. 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 #368934
#23. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #372201
#24. 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 #382159
#25. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #404097
#26. Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #408487
#27. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #422550
#28. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #449942
#29. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #450607
#30. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #462895
#31. To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #467561
#32. 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 #469662
#33. 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 #485825
#34. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #492708
#35. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #494204
#36. I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #506854
#37. 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 #531010
#38. Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #537109
#39. From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #538394
#40. I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #575855
#41. Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #587250
#42. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #619654
#43. '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

Samuel Delany Quotes #621578
#44. 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 #633998
#45. If you are angle, I am complement. If you are circle, I am circumscribed.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #641978
#46. You do not need an identity to become yourself; you need an identity to become -like- someone else.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #644500
#47. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #679696
#48. Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #684925
#49. He shrugged. Confusion was like struggling to find the proper way to sit inside his skin.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #732524
#50. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #749207
#51. 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 #752060
#52. 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 #768924
#53. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #786625
#54. 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 #811358
#55. 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 #831934
#56. 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 #833300
#57. This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #837204
#58. You are trapped in that bright moment where you learned your doom

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #842370
#59. 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 #867978
#60. Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #873817
#61. Will sex between humans ever lose its endlessly repeated history?

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #922453
#62. So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The indark answered with wind.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #934738
#63. 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 #945806
#64. He wanted to talk and had nothing to say.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #967679
#65. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #971202
#66. Neurotics, proceed with delusions of grandeur. Napoleon Bonaparte, take the lead. Jesus Christ, bring up the rear. Simulate severe depression. Non-communicative with repressed hostility.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #975623
#67. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #979555
#68. 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 #984017
#69. Suggestion is a literary strategy.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #997072
#70. When he's connected up to your nervous system, you'll be able to make him whistle, hiss, roar, flap his wings, and spit sparks, though it may take a few days to assimilate him into your body picture. Don't be surprised if at first he just burps and looks seasick. Take your shirt off, please.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #1029055
#71. 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 #1034497
#72. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #1039487
#73. 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 #1045927
#74. Honesty is the best policy ; a policy is, after all, a strategy for living in the polis in the city ...

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #1054630
#75. To live within the tethers of desire is - again and again - to be shocked at how far they have come loose from reason

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #1085021
#76. Pain ... after you've lived with it long enough, isn't pain anymore. It's something else.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #1102874
#77. The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #1128246
#78. 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 #1134728
#79. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #1150293
#80. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #1162350
#81. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #1162731
#82. 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 #1177490
#83. 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 #1185297
#84. 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 #1186143
#85. 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 #1210014
#86. '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

Samuel Delany Quotes #1218210
#87. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #1296568
#88. 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 #1297960
#89. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #1311925
#90. 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 #1342655
#91. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #1350454
#92. 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 #1352303
#93. The rich are always enamored of the ancient.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #1356311
#94. Jo, you're you. And that's as important as you want to make it.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #1366299
#95. Bellona used to be a pretty good town.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #1383625
#96. The truth is always multiplex.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Delany Quotes #1396721
#97. 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 #1409531
#98. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #1419240
#99. 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

Samuel Delany Quotes #1422688
#100. 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 #1429164

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