Samuel R. Delany quotes - page 2

I was born,” the Mouse said. "I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you. (Samuel R. Delany)
Bayle turned to watch the drifting mists along the shore and thought: In three days we have eaten with this Captain four times, talked with him about navigation, his three families, his collection of miniature clay idols, and have all decided he is a deep and impressive, if somewhat absentminded man. Yes, save I take this same ship returning, I may never see him again. Strange are the ways of travel. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
Her mother's humpf mixed contempt with frustration. "You just don't understand anything, do you? We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the world's evils, only to find we've raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity!”. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
You mean I've come all this way to kill a man, and you tell me he's gone? View quote
Samuel R. Delany
Books! Real books were Joneny's delight. Heavy, cumbersome, difficult to store, they were the bane of most scholars. Joneny found them entrancing. He didn't care what was in them. Any book today was so old that each word glittered to him like the facet of a lost gem. The whole conception of a book was so at odds with this compressed, crowded, breakneck era that he was put into ecstasy by the simple heft of the paper. His own collection, some seventy volumes, was considered a pretentious luxury by everyone at the University. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
Suppose I was researching, not the life of some genius philosopher with his books and articles and a wake of articulate friends and acquaintances, but rather, a homeless kid in and out of mental hospitals for chronic masturbation and indecent exposure?...How would I even start? View quote
Samuel R. Delany
But almost as if presenting the image of some ironic answer, the wings flapped against a sudden, high, unfelt breeze, and the beast, here shorn of all fables, rose and rose-for a while-under the night. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
She simply has no concept of what's real and what's fantasy-did I say? She's in the theater. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
Difference is the foundation of those buildings, the pilings beneath the docks, tangled in the roots of the trees. Half the place was built on it. The other half couldn't live without it. But to talk about it in public reveals you to be ill-mannered and vulgar. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
You're not looking for me, you know. I'm looking for you. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
That's the trouble with spies, you know. It's not that they carry information. It's that they carry fragmentary information, out of context, misconstrued, badly interpreted, incomplete, and misread. (Samuel R. Delany)
The whole problem, I suppose, is that any time some piece of communication strikes poor Fred, or any of the remaining Beasts, for that matter, as possibly meaningful-or is it meaningless? It's been explained to me a dozen times and I still can't get it right-anyway, his religious convictions say he has to either stop it or-barring that-refuse to be a party to it. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
He was learning that power-the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations-was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
For better or for worse, she found herself putting aside fear in favor of curiosity. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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? View quote
Samuel R. Delany
All right. I'm not opposed to reality imitating art if it doesn't get in the way. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
I must remember my own origins. Once I was as ignorant as you; I swear, though, I can't remember when. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
Endings to be useful must be inconclusive. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind---vividly, forcefully... View quote
Samuel R. Delany
With adolescence, Pryn had certainly taken on the sometimes troubling knowledge that almost anything with an outside and an inside supporting movement from one to the other could be sexually suggestive. (Samuel R. Delany)
As morning branded the sea, darkness fell away at the far side of the beach. I turned to follow it. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
Young writers take that most communal object, language, and perform on it that most individual act, creation. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
Whoever heard of La-ing or Lo-ing somebody you're herding goats with, or laughing with, or making love with. View quote
Samuel R. Delany