Samuel R. Delany - Book Quotes

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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
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.

Samuel R. Delany
Yeah, nigger, you better grin. Niggers can't smile in this book.

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?

Samuel R. Delany
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.

Samuel R. Delany