Samuel R. Delany Quotes

“All right. I’m not opposed to reality imitating art if it doesn’t get in the way.”

Section 2
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind---vividly, forcefully…”

Source: Lines of Power (1968), p. 26

“The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.”

Source: About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews

Samuel R. Delany book Dhalgren

Source: Dhalgren

“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 book Dhalgren

Source: Dhalgren

Samuel R. Delany Quotes about the trip

“You were beautiful and heartless…in some ways rather a bore. But you have grown up into another over-refined soul of the sort our aristocracy is so good at producing and which produces so little itself save ways to spend unconscionable amounts on castles, clothes, and complex towers to keep comfortable impossible beasts.”

“At a certain point I came to the conclusion that one of the murderous aspects of the AIDS crisis was that people were used to not talking about sexual experiences in detail. Gay sex for instance does not cause AIDS. There are certain acts that transmit a virus and there are certain other acts that don’t transmit a virus. If you don’t talk about what goes on in sexuality, so that you know what particular acts you’re dealing with, then I think you're, possibly in an indirect way but never-the-less in a very real way, contributing to an atmosphere of ignorance which the result is people die.”

Source: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Chapter 5, “The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers” Section 1 (p. 214; ellipsis in the original)

“The city is very different from the country, girl. It is a kind of shared consciousness that begins its work on you as soon as you enter it, if not well before, a consciousness that begins to separate you from the country possibly even before you decide to journey toward it. It encircles you with forces much greater than the walls and gates which imitate tinier villages or towns. People who come to it come seeking the future, not realizing all that will finally affect them in it is their own, only more or less aware, involvement with the past. The way we do things here—really, that’s all there is to be learned in our precincts. But in the paving of every wide, clear avenue, in the turnings of every dark, overhung alley, in the ornaments on every cornice, in the salt-stained stones of each neighborhood cistern, there are traces of the way things once were done—which is the key to why they are done as they are today.”

Spoken Arts interview on WBFO 88.7, 20th April 2000.

“But it's always intriguing to discover the ways in which desire fuels the systems of the world.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 5, “Of Matrons, Mornings, Motives, and Machinations” (p. 104)

Samuel R. Delany book The Mad Man

Source: The Mad Man (1994), p. 257

“The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts, but that it generates a way of thinking.”

“But then, our way is the natural way ordained by god herself, whereas I have no idea whose set of social accidents and economic anomalies have contoured the ways of your odd and awkward land.”

Appendix B (p. 363)
Triton (1976)

“You know, Mouse, I envy the captain. He’s got a mission. And his obsession precludes all that wondering about what other people think of him.”

Section 2 (p. 177)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

Samuel R. Delany Quotes about people

“While any situation could be used as an image of any other, no thing could be an image of another—especially two things as complicated as two people. And to use them as such was to abuse them and delude oneself—that it was the coherence and ability of things (especially people) to be their unique and individual selves that allowed the malleability and richness of images to occur at all.”

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 6 (p. 158)

“You have to grow all the time," I said. "Not necessarily get bigger. But inside your head you have to grow, kid-boy. For us human-type people, that’s what’s important. And that kind of growing never stops. At least, it shouldn’t. You can grow, kid-boy, or you can die. That’s the choice you've got, and it goes on all of your life.”

Section 2 (pp. 102-103)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

“I saw a bunch of the weirdest, oddest people I have ever met in my life, who thought different, and acted different, and even made love different. And they made me laugh, and get angry, and be happy, and be sad, and excited, and even fall in love a little…. And they didn’t seem to be so weird or strange anymore.”

The Star Pit (1967)

Samuel R. Delany book Babel-17

Part 5, Chapter 1
Babel-17 (1966)

“You are not traditionally beautiful; and you know it. We women do. But what most people mean by beauty is really a kind of aesthetic acceptability, not so much character as a lack of it, a set of features and lineaments that hide their history, that suggest history itself does not exist. But the template by which we recognize the features and forms in the human body that cause the heart to halt, threatening to spill us over into the silence of death—that is drawn on another part of the soul entirely…But all sing, chant, hymn the history of the body, if only because we all know how people regard bodies that deviate from the lauded and totally abnormal norm named beauty. Most of us would rather not recognize such desires in ourselves and thus avoid all contemplation of what the possession of such features means about the lives, the bodies, the histories of others, preferring instead to go on merely accepting the acceptable. But that is not who I am.”

“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.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 5, “Of Matrons, Mornings, Motives, and Machinations” (p. 103; ellipsis represents a minor elision of description)

Samuel R. Delany book The Jewels of Aptor

Source: The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Chapter X (p. 133)
Context: 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: Trending quotes

“You're living in the real world now,” Spider said sadly. “It’s come from something. It’s going to something. Myths always lie in the most difficult places to ignore.”

“That is the basis of all magic.”

Section 11
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak.”

Equinox (1973)
Context: Always remember the objects you are working with. When you make a bridge, remember you are putting steel on stone and dirt. … Some day you will write poems to a little girl: marks with ink on paper. … When you are making love, you are moving flesh against flesh. That is the basis of all magic. (p. 30)

“Always remember the objects you are working with.”

Equinox (1973)
Context: 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. (p. 163)

Samuel R. Delany Quotes

“Once I was as ignorant as you; I swear, though, I can’t remember when.”

“A lesson which history should have taught us thousands of years ago was finally driven home. No man can wield absolute power over other men and still retain his own mind.”

Section 9
The Einstein Intersection (1967)
Context: I must remember my own origins. Once I was as ignorant as you; I swear, though, I can’t remember when.

Samuel R. Delany book The Jewels of Aptor

“The science of probability gives mathematical expression to our ignorance, not to our wisdom.”

Samuel R. Delany Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones

Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones (1968)
Context: If everything, everything were known, statistical estimates would be unnecessary. The science of probability gives mathematical expression to our ignorance, not to our wisdom.

“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 book Empire Star

Source: Empire Star (1966), p. 190

“Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.”

“With adolescence, Pryn had certainly taken on the sometimes troubling knowledge that almost anything with an outside and an inside supporting movement from one to the other could be sexually suggestive.”

“As morning branded the sea, darkness fell away at the far side of the beach. I turned to follow it.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 8, “Of Models, Moonlight, Mystery, and Authority” (p. 199)

“Young writers take that most communal object, language, and perform on it that most individual act, creation.”

Section 13 (closing words)
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“Honesty is the best policy; a policy is, after all, a strategy for living in the polis — in the city …”

Appendix B, “Acknowledgments” (p. 447)
Neveryóna (1983)

Samuel R. Delany book The Mad Man

Source: The Mad Man (1994), p. 67; ellipses in the original

“In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.”

“I was born,” the Mouse said. “I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you.”

Section 2
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“Bayle turned to watch the drifting mists along the shore and thought: In three days we have eaten with this Captain four times, talked with him about navigation, his three families, his collection of miniature clay idols, and have all decided he is a deep and impressive, if somewhat absentminded man. Yes, save I take this same ship returning, I may never see him again. Strange are the ways of travel.”

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 5 (p. 156)

“Her mother’s humpf mixed contempt with frustration. “You just don’t understand anything, do you? 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!””

Section 3 (p. 179)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

“You mean I’ve come all this way to kill a man, and you tell me he’s gone?”

Section 3 (p. 115)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

“Books! Real books were Joneny’s delight. Heavy, cumbersome, difficult to store, they were the bane of most scholars. Joneny found them entrancing. He didn’t care what was in them. Any book today was so old that each word glittered to him like the facet of a lost gem. The whole conception of a book was so at odds with this compressed, crowded, breakneck era that he was put into ecstasy by the simple heft of the paper. His own collection, some seventy volumes, was considered a pretentious luxury by everyone at the University.”

Section 3 (p. 183)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

Samuel R. Delany book The Ballad of Beta-2

The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)

“Suppose I was researching, not the life of some genius philosopher with his books and articles and a wake of articulate friends and acquaintances, but rather, a homeless kid in and out of mental hospitals for chronic masturbation and indecent exposure?…How would I even start?”

Samuel R. Delany book The Mad Man

Source: The Mad Man (1994), p. 279

“But almost as if presenting the image of some ironic answer, the wings flapped against a sudden, high, unfelt breeze, and the beast, here shorn of all fables, rose and rose—for a while—under the night.”

“She simply has no concept of what’s real and what’s fantasy—did I say? She’s in the theater.”

Section 3 (p. 245; closing words)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

“Difference is the foundation of those buildings, the pilings beneath the docks, tangled in the roots of the trees. Half the place was built on it. The other half couldn’t live without it. But to talk about it in public reveals you to be ill-mannered and vulgar.”

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 7 “Tiresias Descending, or Trouble on Triton” (p. 322)

“You're not looking for me, you know. I'm looking for you.”

Section 9
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“That’s the trouble with spies, you know. It’s not that they carry information. It’s that they carry fragmentary information, out of context, misconstrued, badly interpreted, incomplete, and misread.”

Section 5
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 8, “Of Models, Moonlight, Mystery, and Authority” (p. 197)

“The whole problem, I suppose, is that any time some piece of communication strikes poor Fred, or any of the remaining Beasts, for that matter, as possibly meaningful—or is it meaningless? It’s been explained to me a dozen times and I still can’t get it right—anyway, his religious convictions say he has to either stop it or—barring that—refuse to be a party to it.”

Section 12
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“Don’t go chattering to the stars if you’re going to do it with your eyes closed.”

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 3 “Avoiding Kangaroos” (p. 113)

“He was learning that power—the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations—was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.”

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 7 (p. 197)

“For better or for worse, she found herself putting aside fear in favor of curiosity.”

Section 2 (p. 37)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

“The doll? Who decided that the young should rehearse the physical care of infants, so that they know them as objects to be bounced, cuddled, or abandoned when boring before they know their own, real infants as living beings full of the responsiveness anterior to language that is the basis of all expressed reason?”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 7, “Of Commerce, Capital, Myths, and Missions” (p. 163)

“And it is the notions of reality and unreality themselves which finally become suspect when either one is mirrored in art, much less when both are mirrored together.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 3, “Of Markets, Maps, Cellars, and Cisterns” (p. 62)

“Whoever heard of La-ing or Lo-ing somebody you’re herding goats with, or laughing with, or making love with.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 3, “Of Markets, Maps, Cellars, and Cisterns” (p. 61)

“What references she’d overheard were all oblique enough so that, without knowing what they referred to, she’d have no way to interpret them and so hadn’t really heard them at all.”

Section 2
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“Slaves are men and women who labor for no pay. Over there are men who do no labor for no pay. The similarity is enough so that they might make the mistake themselves.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 13, “Of Survival, Celebration, and Unlimited Semiosis” (p. 404)

“We have done a tiny bit to free the darkies in this country. But the devil is still very much our slave.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 7, “Of Commerce, Capital, Myths, and Missions” (p. 147)

“It’s a map of a non-existent coast under an imaginary constellation on an impossible sky in—” he grunted, twisting something—“the middle of a ring of meaningless numbers. That’s why it’s powerful. That’s why it’s magic.”

Source: Equinox (1973), p. 60

“The problem you have put me will remain a problem till the globe of the world and the globe of the sun meet in their common center and the one consumes the other. This answer I have proposed, however, humanity will know and forget, know and forget, know and forget again. And that knowing and forgetting will approximate the peaks and depths of civilization as closely as the quotient of your tosses approximates that number which, rationally, we know is not there.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 12, “Of Models, Monsters, Night, and the Numinous” (p. 365)

“All life is a rhythm,” she said as I sat up. “All death is rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 12, “Of Models, Monsters, Night, and the Numinous” (p. 358)

“Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently.”

Section 2
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“And who’s to say where life ceases and theater begins”

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 6 “Objective Knowledge” (p. 266)

“I want to know but I can't see are you up there. I don't have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to”

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 3 “Avoiding Kangaroos” (p. 113)

Samuel R. Delany book Dhalgren

Part VII, "The Anathēmata" (p. 801)
Dhalgren (1975)

“Oh, for the rebirth of an educational system where understanding was an essential part of knowledge.”

“The inevitable is that unprepared for.”

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 2 (p. 26)

“Childhood is that time in which we never question the fact that every adult act is not only an autonomous occurrence in the universe, but that it is also filled, packed, overflowing with meaning, whether that meaning works for ill or good, whether the ill or good is or is not comprehended.
Adulthood is that time in which we see that all human actions follow forms, whether well or badly, and it is the perseverance of the forms that is, whether for better or worse, their meaning.
Various cultures make the transition at various ages, which transition period lasts for varying lengths of time, one accomplishing it in a week with careful dances, ancient prayers, and isolate and specified rituals; another, letting it take its own course, offering no help for it, and allowing it to run on frequently for years. But at the center of the changeover there is a period—whether it be a moment’s vision or a year-long suspicion—where the maturing youth sees all adult behavior as merely formal and totally meaningless.”

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 7 (p. 204)

“I want to talk about love. Loving someone…I mean really loving someone…means you are willing to admit that the person you love is not what you first fell in love with, not the image you first had; and you must be able to like them still for being as close to that image as they are, and avoid disliking them for being so far away.”

Section 3 (p. 114)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

“One would almost think that they [straight white males] felt empowered to take anything the society produced, no matter how marginal, and utilize it for their own ends — dare we say "exploit it"? — certainly to take advantage of it as long as it's around. And could this possibly be an effect of discourse? Perhaps it might even be one we on the margins might reasonably appropriate to our profit… or perhaps some of us already have.”

The Star Pit (1967)

“All you are seeing is your own nostalgia for your girlhood trips up here into the hills, which were no doubt colored with the pleasantries of youth and idealism, which is—won’t you admit it?—finally just a form of ignorance.”

The Rhetoric of Sex, The Discourse of Desire

“Look, if he’s alive, there’s nothing we have to do about it. If he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do.”

Source: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Chapter 2, “The Tale of Old Venn” Section 1 (p. 76)

“To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy—or a teller of tales.”

Source: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Section 4 (p. 192)

“You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 11, “Of Family Gatherings, Grammatology, More Models, and More Mysteries” (p. 313)

“As one grows older, one lives more and more off the little signs of whatever community one moves through day to day and less and less off the gifts that fall out of individual relationships. If one does not prepare for this change in youth, than age becomes a bitter time. This is not to disparage the beauty of one’s relationships with lover or friend. It is only to acknowledge what, for so many in the city, is a sad truth. Community can, however awkwardly, replace individual relationships. But individual relationships only grow poisonous and resentful if there is no community to support them.”

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 3 (p. 36)

“Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 7, “Of Commerce, Capital, Myths, and Missions” (p. 147)