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