Samuel R. Delany
Award-winning science fiction author.
“You have to grow all the time,” I said. “Not necessarily get bigger. But inside your head you have to grow, kid-boy. For us human-type people, that’s what’s important. And that kind of growing never stops. At least, it shouldn’t. You can grow, kid-boy, or you can die. That’s the choice you've got, and it goes on all of your life.”
What I look for in a friend is someone who's different from me. The more different the person is, the more I'll learn from him. The more he'll come up with surprising takes on ideas and things and situations.
Whoever heard of La-ing or Lo-ing somebody you’re herding goats with, or laughing with, or making love with.
She simply has no concept of what’s real and what’s fantasy—did I say? She’s in the theater.
As morning branded the sea, darkness fell away at the far side of the beach. I turned to follow it.
Bear in mind that the novel—no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective—is always a historical projection of its own time.
Honesty is the best policy; a policy is, after all, a strategy for living in the polis — in the city ... [ellipses in original]
The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts, but that it generates a way of thinking.
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.
Always remember the objects you are working with. When you make a bridge, remember you are putting steel on stone and dirt. ... Some day you will write poems to a little girl: marks with ink on paper. ... When you are making love, you are moving flesh against flesh. That is the basis of all magic.
The captain is different too, Cyana. Before, the Roc flew under half a man, a man who’d only known victory. Now I’m a whole man. I know defeat as well.
Finally I just had to get out. Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for whatever purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that’s what is, as far as she’s concerned.
But, like contemporary poetry, philosophy is one of those things, especially at the beginning stages, most people would rather do than study- which is why most of what gets done is so impoverished.
Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don’t you think?
“What do you see, Captain?”
“Two boys with hands locked for a fight. You see how one is light and the other is dark? I see love against death, light against darkness, chaos against order. I see the clash of all opposites under...the sun. I see Prince and myself.”
“Which is which?”
“I don’t know, Mouse.”
“Ah ha!” the Spike said. “I think we have just gotten down to a gritty—or at least a nitty.”
Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently.
Political commitment isn’t a perimeter, Sam; it’s a parameter. Don’t you ever wonder? Don’t you ever doubt?
You know, Mouse, I envy the captain. He’s got a mission. And his obsession precludes all that wondering about what other people think of him.
Don’t go chattering to the stars if you’re going to do it with your eyes closed.