Friday, March 29, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Samuel R. Delany


Award-winning science fiction author.
Samuel R. Delany
Oh, for the rebirth of an educational system where understanding was an essential part of knowledge.
Delany quotes
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.
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.




Delany Samuel R. quotes
“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.”
Delany Samuel R.
“You're living in the real world now,” Spider said sadly. “It’s come from something. It’s going to something. Myths always lie in the most difficult places to ignore.”
Samuel R. Delany quotes
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
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.
Delany Samuel R. quotes
“All life is a rhythm,” she said as I sat up. “All death is rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes.”
Delany
You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough.
Delany Samuel R.
There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.
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 quotes
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
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.
Delany quotes
The inevitable is that unprepared for.
Delany Samuel R.
But it's always intriguing to discover the ways in which desire fuels the systems of the world.
Delany Samuel R. quotes
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.
Samuel R. Delany
If everything, everything were known, statistical estimates would be unnecessary. The science of probability gives mathematical expression to our ignorance, not to our wisdom.
Samuel R. Delany quotes
“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
If you're going to do something stupid—and we all do—it might as well be a brave and foolish thing.
Delany Samuel R.
I read the NAMBLA (Bulletin) fairly regularly and I think it is one of the most intelligent discussions of sexuality I've ever found. I think before you start judging what NAMBLA is about, expose yourself to it and see what it is really about. What the issues they are really talking about, and deal with what's really there rather than this demonized notion of guys running about trying to screw little boys. I would have been so much happier as an adolescent if NAMBLA had been around when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.


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