Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren (1975)

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Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.

Samuel R. Delany
I want to know but I can't see are you up there. I don't have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to

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
"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
Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen.

Samuel R. Delany
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
But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it.

Samuel R. Delany
It's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's.

Samuel R. Delany
Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.

Samuel R. Delany
The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

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

Samuel R. Delany
The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.

Samuel R. Delany
The strange machinery by which a reputation precedes its source we all know is faulty. Yet how much faith we put in it!

Samuel R. Delany