Samuel R. Delany Quotes page 2

“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)

“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 12, “Of Models, Monsters, Night, and the Numinous” (p. 367)

“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)

“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?”

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

“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.”

“One cannot truly trace the course of a life in a thousand pages. Let us have the reticence here not to attempt it in a thousand words.”

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

“Like contemporary poetry, philosophy is one of those things, especially at the beginning stages, most people would rather do than study — which is why most of what gets done is so impoverished.”

Section 2 (p. 46)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

Samuel R. Delany book The Mad Man

Source: The Mad Man (1994), p. 11

“I came no nearer sleep than I came to the moon.”

Samuel R. Delany book The Jewels of Aptor

Source: The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Chapter III (p. 29)

““We’re not going to climb that in the dark, are we?” asked Iimmi.
“Better than in the light,” said Urson. “This way you can’t see how far you have to fall.””

Samuel R. Delany book The Jewels of Aptor

Source: The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Chapter IX (p. 108)

“So,” said Raven, “once again tonight we are presented with a mysterious sign and no way to know whether it completes a pattern or destroys one.”

“Political commitment isn’t a perimeter, Sam; it’s a parameter. Don’t you ever wonder? Don’t you ever doubt?”

Section 3 (p. 245)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

“Nevertheless, I still wonder. Each of us, with money, gets further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket—not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing.”

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 4 “La Geste d’Helstrom” (p. 140)

“To speak the unspeakable without the proper rhetorical flourish or introduction; to muff that flourish, either by accident, misjudgment, or simple ignorance; to choose the wrong flourish or not choose any (i. e., to choose the flourish called "the literal") is to perform the unspeakable.”

Source: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Chapter 4, “The Tale of Potters and Dragons” Section 1 (p. 161)

Samuel R. Delany

On the Unspeakable, Avant-Pop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avant-Pop:_Fiction_for_a_Daydream_Nation, p. 150

“Perhaps it's good you're not going to write anymore: you'd have to start considering all those dull things like your relation to your audience, the relation between your personality and your poetry, the relation between your poetry and all the poetry before it.”

Samuel R. Delany book Dhalgren

Ernest Newboy in Part IV, "In Time of Plague" (p. 357)
Dhalgren (1975)

“"The parts I like, well…" He shook his head, with pursed lips. "They just don't have anything to do with me: somebody else wrote them, it seems, about things I may have thought about once. The parts I don't like--well, I can remember writing those, oh yeah, word by word by word."”

Samuel R. Delany book Dhalgren

Part IV, "In Time of Plague" (p. 357)
Dhalgren (1975)

“You should always tell the truth, she thought, not because one lie leads to another, but rather because one lie could so easily lead you to that terrifying position from which, with just the help of a random dream, you can see, both back and ahead, the morass where truth and falsity are simply, for you, indistinguishable.”

“What real power can buy, of course, is anonymity.”

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 7 “Tiresias Descending, or Trouble on Triton” (p. 329)

““The beginning of the end, the beginning of the end,” muttered Lo Hawk. “We must preserve something.”
“The end of the beginning,” sighed La Dire. “Everything must change.””

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 12, “Of Models, Monsters, Night, and the Numinous” (p. 376)

“Bear in mind that the novel—no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective—is always a historical projection of its own time.”

Section 1
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“You seem to be using some sort of logical system where when you get near any explanation, you say: “By definition my problem is insoluble. Now that explanation over there would solve it. But since I’ve defined my problem as insoluble, then by definition that solution doesn’t apply.””

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 4 (p. 116)

“To be a bandit is better than to be a slave!”

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 3 “Avoiding Kangaroos” (p. 123)

“What I’ve observed—the pattern behind what I’ve observed—explains why what happens happens the way it does. It makes the whole process easier to see. Your idea is a possible explanation not of the observations but of a set of speculations, which, if you accepted them along with the explanation, would then only make you start seeing things and half-things where no things are.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 4, “Of Fate, Fortune, Mayhem, and Mystery” (p. 86)

“Pryn felt the reckless freedom of assertion.”

Section 1 (p. 86)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

“The rich are always enamored of the ancient.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 11, “Of Family Gatherings, Grammatology, More Models, and More Mysteries” (p. 330)

“the Spike said. “I think we have just gotten down to a gritty—or at least a nitty.””

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 6 (p. 169)

“Play makes a human being! Work just means you don’t have to feel guilty about playing, which I don’t feel much anyway. Mainly work means I don’t have to suffer the taunts of my friends who wonder why I’m playing as hard as I do!”

“Ah ha!”
Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 3 “Avoiding Kangaroos” (p. 123)

“It’s a good idea, when people are curious, to give them something to sustain that curiosity—and direct it.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 9, “Of Night, Noon, Time, and Transition” (p. 238)

“Dull grown-ups and bright children form a particularly tolerant friendship.”

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 3, “Of Markets, Maps, Cellars, and Cisterns” (p. 65)

“She recalled her absurd attempt to construct an example—an image that, because it was constructed of things it simply did not fit, reversed the idea into an idea silly by itself, ridiculous in application—a ridiculousness that could easily, she saw, have strayed into the pernicious, the odious, or the destructive, depending on how widely one had insisted on applying it.”

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 3 (p. 44)

“There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.”

Section 2 (p. 104)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

“If you're going to do something stupid—and we all do—it might as well be a brave and foolish thing.”

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 6 (p. 166)

“to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.”

Section 3
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

Samuel R. Delany book Dhalgren

Part I, "Prism, Mirror, Lens" (p. 1)
Dhalgren (1975)

“Earth, the world, the fifth planet from the sun—the species that stands on two legs and roams this thin wet crust: it’s changing, Lobey. It’s not the same. Some people walk under the sun and accept that change, others close their eyes, clap their hands to their ears, and deny the world with their tongues.”

“And of course that is the problem with all truly powerful ideas. And what we have been talking of is certainly that. What it produces is illuminated by it. But applied where it does not pertain, it produces distortions as terrifying as the idea was powerful.”

Section 11 (in the far future of the novel, the sun has captured two more planets)
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“In a sense, modern philosophy is a series of introductions to introductions to introductions, the movement between them controlled by the pro-tective/pro-textive play of forces about desire.”

Section 1 (p. 87)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

“But as soon as any of us dies, there is only the monster left. What I had been pursuing was not Belham but the monster called Belham. And what my whole journey had taught me was precisely what sort of monster it was: it was made, as all such monsters are, of contradiction, supposition, miscalculation, impossibility, and ignorance.”

Appendix B, “Closures and Openings” Section 8 (p. 368; see note on Discussion page)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

“I believe art is a wholly formal enterprise, encompassing almost all the tenets that the nineteenth century spoke of as l’art pour l’art, tenets which have made twentieth century’s experimentation possible.”

Section 9.82 (p. 302)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

“I confess, the Amnewor is new to me. Yes, I’ve heard the name—as a minor fact in some other god’s story. Precisely what it did, though, I can’t remember. That, of course, makes it more intriguing. Death. It was associated with endless, mindless, pointless death. But which of them isn’t?”

What postmodern doesn’t?
Section 9.811 (p. 273)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

“You understand, Pryn, I don’t believe in any of it: magic, miracles, religion, the calling of the gods, named or unnamed.”

Section 9.81 (p. 273)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

“If all human production (aesthetic or otherwise) has its documentary aspect (i. e., it can be associated, by a knowledgeable reader, with a time and place), does this endanger its aesthetic aspects per se? It is the richness of the pattern that is aesthetically at stake. How many art histories does it take to make us understand that reference (a use context) and historicity are not the same?”

Section 9.21 (p. 248)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

“Content, of course, must have some form. And form, of course, creates its content/commentary. This is why their chimeras have chased each other through moment after moment of history, the intense perception of one or the other producing the overwhelming effect: Art.”

Section 8.55 (p. 241)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

“It is the rare society that does not abuse its artists.”

Section 8.21 (p. 232)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

“But whatever you say of them, finally I had to dismiss such notions as the ratiocinations desire can entangle about the most sensible of us.”

Section 7.2 (p. 216)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

“What makes a boy interesting does not make a man interesting.”

Source: Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), Section 4 (p. 164)

“Life is hard for everyone, and we must not take credit ourselves for the little that others can do with theirs. Rather look instead to whom we can give credit, if not thanks, for what little we have been able to do with our own.”

Section 1 (p. 136)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)