Samuel R. Delany Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

In the arts, people are always waiting for someone or some movement to "fulfill her/its/his promise." Then, half-a-dozen or a dozen years on, others begin to realize that, really, something extraordinary was actually happening.

Samuel R. Delany
If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.

Samuel R. Delany
As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.

Samuel R. Delany
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.

Samuel R. Delany
'You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land, while we...' She turned her head right, left, and her black hair curled and uncurled on the shoulder of her coat. 'We have our dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshiping you!'

Samuel R. Delany
When what is is congruent to what is supposed, the reaction is functional and the mental processes competent. When what is and what is supposed have nothing to do with each other, the choice of reactions is random. Something tears.

Samuel R. Delany
But it's always intriguing to discover the ways in which desire fuels the systems of the world.

Samuel R. Delany
It would be as naive to think that all forgettings are random as it would be to think thus of all dreams: the first things to go are, systematically, the incidents confirming our own weaknesses which, because we are lucky enough not to have to talk about, there's no particular reason to recall. The incidents we will, likewise, retain are among those that tell of a certain strength.

Samuel R. Delany
I still believe pattern fascinates on its own. And three-sevenths of a pattern, or even a smaller fragment, can fascinate still more--get us really hunkering down, trying to tease out the whole of the figure in the carpet.

Samuel R. Delany
It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art.

Samuel R. Delany
A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.

Samuel R. Delany
Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life.

Samuel R. Delany
Do you know how hard it is to make a home?... That's something that a woman does from inside herself. You do it in the face of all sorts of opposition. Husbands are very appreciative when it works out well. But they're not that anxious to help. It's understandable. They don't know how.

Samuel R. Delany
Imagine, a great web that spreads across the galaxy, as far as man. That's the matrix in which history happens today.... Each individual is a junction in that net, and the strands between are the cultural, the economic, the psychological threads that hold individual to individual.

Samuel R. Delany
Pain... after you've lived with it long enough, isn't pain anymore. It's something else.

Samuel R. Delany
Ah, well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us for that.

Samuel R. Delany
Reality must prove itself again and again to questioners... it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself.

Samuel R. Delany
Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed.

Samuel R. Delany
You're not looking for me, you know. I'm looking for you.

Samuel R. Delany
Dull grown-ups and bright children form a particularly tolerant friendship.

Samuel R. Delany
To wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.

Samuel R. Delany
One would almost think that they [straight white males] felt empowered to take anything the society produced, no matter how marginal, and utilize it for their own ends — dare we say "exploit it"? — certainly to take advantage of it as long as it's around. And could this possibly be an effect of discourse? Perhaps it might even be one we on the margins might reasonably appropriate to our profit... or perhaps some of us already have.

Samuel R. Delany
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
We have done a tiny bit to free the darkies in this country. But the devil is still very much our slave.

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.

Samuel R. Delany
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.

Samuel R. Delany
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.

Samuel R. Delany
I saw a bunch of the weirdest, oddest people I have ever met in my life, who thought different, and acted different, and even made love different. And they made me laugh, and get angry, and be happy, and be sad, and excited, and even fall in love a little.... And they didn't seem to be so weird or strange anymore.

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.

Samuel R. Delany
"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