Samuel R. Delany: Trending quotes

“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)

“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.”

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

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

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

Samuel R. Delany book Triton

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 3 “Avoiding Kangaroos” (p. 54)

“Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don’t you think?”

Samuel R. Delany book Babel-17

Part 2, Chapter 4
Babel-17 (1966)

“The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.”

“Myself, I suspect it’s a kind of madness: the madness that makes one repeat whatever one is trained to repeat.”

Source: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Chapter 3, “The Tale of Small Sarg” Section 3 (p. 140)

“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.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 12, “Of Models, Monsters, Night, and the Numinous” (p. 367)

“It is far easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.”

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

“The captain is different too, Cyana. Before, the Roc flew under half a man, a man who’d only known victory. Now I’m a whole man. I know defeat as well.”

Section 4 (p. 196)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

“Gorgik began to learn that most valuable of lessons without which no social progress is possible: If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.”

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 5 (p. 142)

“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.”

Source: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Chapter 1, “The Tale of Gorgik” Section 2 (p. 15)

Samuel R. Delany book The Einstein Intersection

Section 9 (quoted from Ortega y Gasset, “On Love”)
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“What do you see, Captain?”
“Two boys with hands locked for a fight. You see how one is light and the other is dark? I see love against death, light against darkness, chaos against order. I see the clash of all opposites under…the sun. I see Prince and myself.”
“Which is which?”

“What I look for in a friend is someone who's different from me. The more different the person is, the more I'll learn from him. The more he'll come up with surprising takes on ideas and things and situations.”

“I don’t know, Mouse.”
Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 4 (p. 119)

Samuel R. Delany book The Mad Man

Source: The Mad Man (1994), p. 239

“Finally I just had to get out. Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for whatever purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that’s what is, as far as she’s concerned.”

Samuel R. Delany book Triton

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

“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.”