Samuel R. Delany: Trending quotes

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Samuel R. Delany: 262 quotes4 likes

“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?”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

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

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

Samuel R. Delany book The Einstein Intersection

Section 2
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

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

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

Samuel R. Delany book Equinox

Source: Equinox (1973), p. 60

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

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

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

Samuel R. Delany book The Einstein Intersection

Section 2
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“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 book Triton

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

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

Samuel R. Delany book Triton

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

“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”

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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Nova

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

“The inevitable is that unprepared for.”

Samuel R. Delany book Nova

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany

The Star Pit (1967)

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany

The Rhetoric of Sex, The Discourse of Desire

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany

The Star Pit (1967)

“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 book Triton

Appendix B (p. 363)
Triton (1976)