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Samuel R. Delany citations
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Samuel Ray Delany Junior, né le 1er avril 1942 à New York aux États-Unis, est un critique et un romancier de science-fiction d'origine afro-américaine. Wikipedia  

✵ 1. avril 1942
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Samuel R. Delany: 131 citations0 J'aime

Samuel R. Delany: Citations en anglais

“But it's always intriguing to discover the ways in which desire fuels the systems of the world.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre The Mad Man

Source: The Mad Man (1994), p. 257

“All you are seeing is your own nostalgia for your girlhood trips up here into the hills, which were no doubt colored with the pleasantries of youth and idealism, which is—won’t you admit it?—finally just a form of ignorance.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Tales of Nevèrÿon

Source: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Chapter 2, “The Tale of Old Venn” Section 1 (p. 76)

“Look, if he’s alive, there’s nothing we have to do about it. If he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Tales of Nevèrÿon

Source: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Section 4 (p. 192)

“To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy—or a teller of tales.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Neveryóna

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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Neveryóna

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

“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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

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

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Samuel R. Delany livre Triton

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

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

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Samuel R. Delany livre 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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

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

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Samuel R. Delany livre Neveryóna

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

“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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Neveryóna

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

“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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

“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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Nova

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

“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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

“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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre 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?”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Nova

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

“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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre 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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre 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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Nova

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 6 (p. 158)

“At a certain point I came to the conclusion that one of the murderous aspects of the AIDS crisis was that people were used to not talking about sexual experiences in detail. Gay sex for instance does not cause AIDS. There are certain acts that transmit a virus and there are certain other acts that don’t transmit a virus. If you don’t talk about what goes on in sexuality, so that you know what particular acts you’re dealing with, then I think you're, possibly in an indirect way but never-the-less in a very real way, contributing to an atmosphere of ignorance which the result is people die.”

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Samuel R. Delany

Spoken Arts interview on WBFO 88.7, 20th April 2000.

“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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

“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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre The Mad Man

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

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

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Samuel R. Delany livre 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.””

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Samuel R. Delany livre 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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

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

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Samuel R. Delany livre Triton

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

“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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Tales of Nevèrÿon

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

“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.”

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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.”

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Samuel R. Delany livre Dhalgren

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