Memoirists From The United States

"“The aristocracy,” she repeated. “At its worst, a sargasso of every conceivable neurosis society may have; by naming itself it has agreed to its own death. But at least it has had the dignity to applaud its own order of execution in the past if the document is eloquent.”"

"When what is is congruent to what is supposed the reaction is functional and the mental processes competent. When what is and what is supposed to have nothing to do with each other the choice of reactions is random. Something tears. Stay or run, laugh or frown: the decision is chance."

"I was thinking about what I said to you about customs and morals keeping people apart, making them different from one another. People are so much more alike than different. So much more."

"The army is just too easy and too simple: fight to the death for the cause is just."

"That’s the army. But our job was to make the rest of you think it was safe and glorious and good, too. Boys into men? Discipline that isn’t self-discipline doesn’t mean thing to a boy."

"Jon was surprised. “You don’t believe that military discipline can be a good experience?” “Experience is what you make it,” the officer said. “That’s real profound, huh? Boys into men? Look at the guys who like the army, or even do well there. Guys who hate the random inconsistency of their parents so much they are willing to give up love to get a father who hands out his orders by a book of rules you can run and check in the library, even if the rule is go out and die. You’ll do a lot better if you come to terms with the father you already have than by running off to the state substitute.” Despite drunkenness, the man was maintaining logic, so Jon went on, “but doesn’t the army give you a fairly rigorous microcosm to work out certain problems of…well, honour and morality, at least for yourself—” “Sure,” drawled the officer, “a microcosm totally safe, completely unreal, free of women and children, where God is the general and the Devil is death, and you’re playing for keeps—the excuse for conducting everything with high seriousness. It was all set up to make the most destructive and illogical human actions appear as controlled and non-random as possible."

"They could all know now if they wanted, but they are too embarrassed. Rolth, for three thousand years everyone has tried to find a word to differentiate men from other animals; some of the ancients called him the laughing animal, some the moral animal. Well, I wonder if he isn’t the embarrassed animal."

"He sat cross-legged in the crumpled, body-warmed bedding, now, and looked at her beside him until his eyes ached with keeping his lids up, looking not to miss the beauty of her breathing, the faint flare of her nostrils, the rise of her chest, the movement of her skin a millimetre back and forth across her collarbone as she breathed. His eyes, flooded with her gloriousness, filled with tears. He had to blink and look away."

"Simply turn them loose in the haze of their own injured psyches and they will create an enemy, greater and more malignant than any a psychologist could create for them, always hidden behind their own terror."

"They did not realize that reality must prove itself again and again to questioners, and that it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself under logical rigour. The idea of asking questions was almost impossible; but only almost."

"I must say it’s all very interesting. But I seriously don’t believe it’s anything more than a psychotic fantasy on your part."

"About drafting all the scientific students into the war effort. Maybe the war is good, but, Tomar, I’m working on my own project. All at once, the thing I want most in the world is to be left alone to work on it. And I want you, and I want to have a picnic. I’m nearly at the solution, and to have to stop and work on bomb sightings and missile trajectories…Tomar, there’s a beauty in abstract mathematics that shouldn’t be dulled with that sort of thing."

"Perhaps coming from the royal family, I had easier emotional access to a sense of Toromon’s history. Even at its best, that’s all an aristocracy is good for."

"It means you don’t like where you’ve been, the place where you are is grim, and the only place you see yourself going is not an improvement on what’s gone before."

"A lesson which history should have taught us thousands of years ago was finally driven home. No man can wield absolute power over other men and still retain his own mind. For no matter how good his intentions are when he takes up the power, his alternate reason is that freedom, the freedom of other people and ultimately his own, terrifies him. Only a man afraid of freedom would want this power, who could conceive of wielding it. And that fear of freedom will turn him into a slave of this power."

"Dictators during the entire history of this planet have used similar techniques. By not letting the people of their country know what conditions existed outside their boundaries, they could get the people to fight to stay in those conditions. It was the old adage: Convince a slave that he’s free, and he will fight to maintain his slavery."

"“We’re not going to climb that in the dark, are we?” asked Iimmi. “Better than in the light,” said Urson. “This way you can’t see how far you have to fall.”"

"I came no nearer sleep than I came to the moon."

"I'm not a big fan of censorship, to put it mildly."

"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."

"At a certain point I came to the conclusion that one of the murderous aspects of the AIDS crisis was that people were used to not talking about sexual experiences in detail. Gay sex for instance does not cause AIDS. There are certain acts that transmit a virus and there are certain other acts that don’t transmit a virus. If you don’t talk about what goes on in sexuality, so that you know what particular acts you’re dealing with, then I think you're, possibly in an indirect way but never-the-less in a very real way, contributing to an atmosphere of ignorance which the result is people die."

"To speak the unspeakable without the proper rhetorical flourish or introduction; to muff that flourish, either by accident, misjudgment, or simple ignorance; to choose the wrong flourish or not choose any (i.e., to choose the flourish called "the literal") is to perform the unspeakable."

"…There's often a literal side to SF [science fiction] language. There are many strings of words that can appear both in an SF text and in an ordinary text of naturalistic fiction. But when they appear in a naturalistic text we interpret them one way, and when they appear in an SF text we interpret them another. Let me illustrate this by some examples I've used many times before. The phrase "her world exploded" in a naturalistic text will be a metaphor for a female character's emotional state; but in an SF text, if you had the same words— "her world exploded"—you'd have to maintain the possibility that they meant: a planet belonging to a woman blew up…"

"Delany: All hail the King."

"Sam Delaney said about science fiction that it was a rich symbiotic environment that talks about what you desire. Someone was asking him about sexuality in his work and whether he thought the genre of science fiction allowed him to play, and he said that there was something, not just about science fiction books, but about science fiction culture, about going to cons, and about that being a unique place in allowing people to articulate what they desire and what they fantasize about, whether or not it was something they would actually do, that this freed them up in a way."

"there is Samuel R. Delany who was one of my teachers and who's kind of the grand master."

""I think I ain't never met a normal, I mean normal, man who wasn't crazy! Loon crazy, take 'em off and put 'em away crazy, which is what they would do if there wasn't so many of them. Every normal man — I mean sexually normal, now — man I ever met figures the whole thing runs between two points: What he wants, and what he thinks should be. Every thought in his head is directed to fixing a rule-straight line between them, and he calls that line: What Is. … On the other hand, every faggot or panty-sucker, or whip jockey, or SM freak, or baby-fucker, or even a motherfucker like me, we know —" and his hands came down like he was pushing something away: "We know, man, that there is what we want, there is what should be, and there is what is: and don't none of them got anything to do with each other unless —" The bartender was shaking his head." — unless we make it," Hogg went on anyway."

"Men hate bitches the way white men hate niggers. … Long as they do like we say they're suppose to do, everything always looks fine. But let one of them get even a little, teeny, weeny bit out of line, then you watch what happens — we wanna kill. We may not kill, but we wanna kill. Well, if I was a bitch and knew what I know 'cause I ain't one, I'd get out there and start killin' first."

"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?"

"But it's always intriguing to discover the ways in which desire fuels the systems of the world."

"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."

"Honesty is the best policy; a policy is, after all, a strategy for living in the polis — in the city …"

"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."

"I have always tried to do what was right. But long ago I learned that being right was a brutal, cruel, and thankless position. Oh—I wish I could see you more clearly! If you pursue yourself in that manner, your friends will criticize you for it, call you a fool—as I have called you. But then, with only a few unhappy moments, I’ve always considered myself your friend. The things that made you hate me, I only did to shock you, to wake you up, to make you become yourself…"

"Oh, I cannot tell you how the notion of eternity bores me—not to mention all the silly stories we are always making up to render the idea palatable!"

"I’ve always thought thinking about how to live was more important than thinking about after we die. One likes to assume death will take care of itself. It’s just a bit disconcerting to see so many other people putting so much energy into taking care of it for you. Life has always been such a surprise, death, I expect—even if it’s nothing—will be one too."

"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."

"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."

"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.”"

"Men and women are less than a chromosome apart."

"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."

"Origins are always constructs, always contouring ideological agendas."

"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."

"We moved toward that precipice with a motion as inexorable as that with which time takes us toward our death."

"The audience’s performance is always more or less stochastic."

"The artist’s performance is always more or less aleatory."

"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."

"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."

"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?)"

"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?"