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Samuel R. Delany
166 quotes
“Look, if he’s alive, there’s nothing we have to do about it. If he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is far easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You were beautiful and heartless...in some ways rather a bore. But you have grown up into another over-refined soul of the sort our aristocracy is so good at producing and which produces so little itself save ways to spend unconscionable amounts on castles, clothes, and complex towers to keep comfortable impossible beasts.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So,” said Raven, “once again tonight we are presented with a mysterious sign and no way to know whether it completes a pattern or destroys one.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But almost as if presenting the image of some ironic answer, the wings flapped against a sudden, high, unfelt breeze, and the beast, here shorn of all fables, rose and rose—for a while—under the night.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And it is the notions of reality and unreality themselves which finally become suspect when either one is mirrored in art, much less when both are mirrored together.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The doll? Who decided that the young should rehearse the physical care of infants, so that they know them as objects to be bounced, cuddled, or abandoned when boring before they know their own, real infants as living beings full of the responsiveness anterior to language that is the basis of all expressed reason?”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a good idea, when people are curious, to give them something to sustain that curiosity—and direct it.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be a bandit is better than to be a slave!”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Slaves are men and women who labor for no pay. Over there are men who do no labor for no pay. The similarity is enough so that they might make the mistake themselves.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As one grows older, one lives more and more off the little signs of whatever community one moves through day to day and less and less off the gifts that fall out of individual relationships. If one does not prepare for this change in youth, than age becomes a bitter time. This is not to disparage the beauty of one’s relationships with lover or friend. It is only to acknowledge what, for so many in the city, is a sad truth. Community can, however awkwardly, replace individual relationships. But individual relationships only grow poisonous and resentful if there is no community to support them.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For better or for worse, she found herself putting aside fear in favor of curiosity.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That’s the trouble with spies, you know. It’s not that they carry information. It’s that they carry fragmentary information, out of context, misconstrued, badly interpreted, incomplete, and misread.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With adolescence, Pryn had certainly taken on the sometimes troubling knowledge that almost anything with an outside and an inside supporting movement from one to the other could be sexually suggestive.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Play makes a human being! Work just means you don’t have to feel guilty about playing, which I don’t feel much anyway. Mainly work means I don’t have to suffer the taunts of my friends who wonder why I’m playing as hard as I do!”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy—or a teller of tales.’”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pryn felt the reckless freedom of assertion.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘The problem you have put me will remain a problem till the globe of the world and the globe of the sun meet in their common center and the one consumes the other. This answer I have proposed, however, humanity will know and forget, know and forget, know and forget again. And that knowing and forgetting will approximate the peaks and depths of civilization as closely as the quotient of your tosses approximates that number which, rationally, we know is not there.’”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a map of a non-existent coast under an imaginary constellation on an impossible sky in—” he grunted, twisting something—“the middle of a ring of meaningless numbers. That’s why it’s powerful. That’s why it’s magic.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Myself, I suspect it’s a kind of madness: the madness that makes one repeat whatever one is trained to repeat.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What real power can buy, of course, is anonymity.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What references she’d overheard were all oblique enough so that, without knowing what they referred to, she’d have no way to interpret them and so hadn’t really heard them at all.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Young writers take that most communal object, language, and perform on it that most individual act, creation.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Appearances are signs of possibilities, at least when one remembers that what appears may be a sign by masking as easily as by manifesting.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life, I sometimes think—like dreams, like stories, like plans, even like lies if you will—is to be pondered on, interpreted, interrogated: but you had best not try to change it too radically in the middle, or you risk never finding its secret.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m a public man, my princess. That means my only meaning is the web of signs I publicly inhabit.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Could it be, he wondered, he’d only thought he’d seen what he’d seen because of his own desires, researches, expectations?”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But that kind has not a true word in him. I wouldn’t be surprised if everything he said were a lie. Such as he lies as he breathes. Truth is something he’s never even learned to speak.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is hard for everyone, and we must not take credit ourselves for the little that others can do with theirs. Rather look instead to whom we can give credit, if not thanks, for what little we have been able to do with our own.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What makes a boy interesting does not make a man interesting.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But whatever you say of them, finally I had to dismiss such notions as the ratiocinations desire can entangle about the most sensible of us.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be morally upset about how other people take their sexual pleasure is surely the weirdest human quirk ever.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the rare society that does not abuse its artists.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Content, of course, must have some form. And form, of course, creates its content/commentary. This is why their chimeras have chased each other through moment after moment of history, the intense perception of one or the other producing the overwhelming effect: Art.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If all human production (aesthetic or otherwise) has its documentary aspect (i.e., it can be associated, by a knowledgeable reader, with a time and place), does this endanger its aesthetic aspects per se? It is the richness of the pattern that is aesthetically at stake. How many art histories does it take to make us understand that reference (a use context) and historicity are not the same?”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You understand, Pryn, I don’t believe in any of it: magic, miracles, religion, the calling of the gods, named or unnamed.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I confess, the Amnewor is new to me. Yes, I’ve heard the name—as a minor fact in some other god’s story. Precisely what it did, though, I can’t remember. That, of course, makes it more intriguing. Death. It was associated with endless, mindless, pointless death. But which of them isn’t?”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe art is a wholly formal enterprise, encompassing almost all the tenets that the nineteenth century spoke of as l’art pour l’art, tenets which have made twentieth century’s experimentation possible. (What postmodern doesn’t?)”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But as soon as any of us dies, there is only the monster left. What I had been pursuing was not Belham but the monster called Belham. And what my whole journey had taught me was precisely what sort of monster it was: it was made, as all such monsters are, of contradiction, supposition, miscalculation, impossibility, and ignorance.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes, I learned about monsters on that trip. And I learned about them in these encounters afterward: First, monsters are real. Second, they are us.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The artist’s performance is always more or less aleatory.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The audience’s performance is always more or less stochastic.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We moved toward that precipice with a motion as inexorable as that with which time takes us toward our death.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a sense, modern philosophy is a series of introductions to introductions to introductions, the movement between them controlled by the pro-tective/pro-textive play of forces about desire.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Origins are always constructs, always contouring ideological agendas.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I felt, and still feel, that it is important for fantasy to have a grasp of the complexity of fact, if not of factual content.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men and women are less than a chromosome apart.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The deconstructionists have led off this set of new readings most energetically by asking of certain texts: “What do they have to say that specifically undermines and subverts their own ideological array?” As energetic as the deconstructionist foray has been, we must remember that there are still going to be many texts for which we can expect the answer: “Not much.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, I assure you—I’m only a little outlaw. Don’t fear me, friend. I never broke any big laws. I just forget and do what I want sometimes, and discover it wasn’t what someone else wanted me to do.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Half dead’s a lot worse than dead, when you know you’re gonna die in another three, six days no matter what anyone else does.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source