Samuel R. Delany: Thing

Samuel R. Delany is American author, professor and literary critic. Explore interesting quotes on thing.
Samuel R. Delany: 262 quotes4 likes

““What are you doing here?” I asked at last.
“Probably the same thing you are.”
“What’s that?”
She looked serious. “Why don’t you tell me?”
I went back to my knife. “Sharpening my machete.”
“I'm sharpening my mind,” she said. “There is something to be done that will require an edge on both.””

Samuel R. Delany book The Einstein Intersection

Section 2
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

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

Samuel R. Delany book Equinox

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)

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

Samuel R. Delany

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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book The Mad Man

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book The Mad Man

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

“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)

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

“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.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

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.”

Samuel R. Delany book The Einstein Intersection

Section 3
The Einstein Intersection (1967)