Samuel R. Delany: Trending quotes

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

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.”

Samuel R. Delany book The Einstein Intersection

Section 2
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

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

Samuel R. Delany book Nova

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

“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!””

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

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

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 3 (p. 183)
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.”

Samuel R. Delany book The Ballad of Beta-2

The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Babel-17

Part 5, Chapter 1
Babel-17 (1966)

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

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

Samuel R. Delany book Triton

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book The Einstein Intersection

Section 9
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

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

Samuel R. Delany book The Einstein Intersection

Section 5
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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Triton

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

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

Samuel R. Delany book Nova

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

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

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

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