Samuel R. Delany

"“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.”"

"Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman."

"As morning branded the sea, darkness fell away at the far side of the beach. I turned to follow it."

"All right. I’m not opposed to reality imitating art if it doesn’t get in the way."

"Sincerity is my favorite form of belligerence."

"“Gods are nothing but low blood sugar,” I said. “St. Augustine, Peyote Indians…you know how it works—"

"Oh, for the rebirth of an educational system where understanding was an essential part of knowledge."

"You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough."

"Dull grown-ups and bright children form a particularly tolerant friendship."

"Bear in mind that the novel—no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective—is always a historical projection of its own time."

"“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.”"

"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."

"“I was born,” the Mouse said. “I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you.”"

"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."

"There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three."

"The rich are always enamored of the ancient."

"Don’t go chattering to the stars if you’re going to do it with your eyes closed."

"The inevitable is that unprepared for."

"If everything, everything were known, statistical estimates would be unnecessary. The science of probability gives mathematical expression to our ignorance, not to our wisdom."

"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. (p. 163)"

"We have done a tiny bit to free the darkies in this country. But the devil is still very much our slave. (p. 60)"

"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. (p. 30)"

"Yeah, nigger, you better grin. Niggers can't smile in this book. (p. 87)"

"to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name. The in-dark answered with wind."

"The parts I like, well..." He shook his head, with pursed lips. "They just don't have anything to do with me: somebody else wrote them, it seems, about things I may have thought about once. The parts I don't like--well, I can remember writing those, oh yeah, word by word by word."

"Perhaps it's good you're not going to write anymore: you'd have to start considering all those dull things like your relation to your audience, the relation between your personality and your poetry, the relation between your poetry and all the poetry before it."

"I want to know but I can't see are you up there. I don't have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to"

"Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep."

"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."

"And who’s to say where life ceases and theater begins—"

"“Ah ha!” the Spike said. “I think we have just gotten down to a gritty—or at least a nitty.”"

"You seem to be using some sort of logical system where when you get near any explanation, you say: “By definition my problem is insoluble. Now that explanation over there would solve it. But since I’ve defined my problem as insoluble, then by definition that solution doesn’t apply.”"

"Political commitment isn’t a perimeter, Sam; it’s a parameter. Don’t you ever wonder? Don’t you ever doubt?"

"Let me tell you a secret. There is a difference between men and women, a little, tiny one that, I’m afraid, has probably made most of your adult life miserable and will probably continue to make it so till you die. The difference is simply that women have only really been treated, by that bizarre, Derkheimian abstraction, “society,” as human beings for the last—oh, say sixty-five years; and then, really, only on the moons; whereas men have had the luxury of such treatment for the last four thousand. The result of this historical anomaly is simply that, on a statistical basis, women are just a little less willing to put up with certain kinds of shit than men—simply because the concept of a certain kind of shit-free Universe is, in that equally bizarre Jungian abstraction, the female “collective unconscious,” too new and too precious."

"Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently."

"She simply has no concept of what’s real and what’s fantasy—did I say? She’s in the theater."

"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."

"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."

"The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts, but that it generates a way of thinking."

"Gorgik began to learn that most valuable of lessons without which no social progress is possible: If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful."

"He was learning that power—the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations—was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it."

"One cannot truly trace the course of a life in a thousand pages. Let us have the reticence here not to attempt it in a thousand words."

"All you are seeing is your own nostalgia for your girlhood trips up here into the hills, which were no doubt colored with the pleasantries of youth and idealism, which is—won’t you admit it?—finally just a form of ignorance."

"What I’ve observed—the pattern behind what I’ve observed—explains why what happens happens the way it does. It makes the whole process easier to see. Your idea is a possible explanation not of the observations but of a set of speculations, which, if you accepted them along with the explanation, would then only make you start seeing things and half-things where no things are."

"And of course that is the problem with all truly powerful ideas. And what we have been talking of is certainly that. What it produces is illuminated by it. But applied where it does not pertain, it produces distortions as terrifying as the idea was powerful."

"While any situation could be used as an image of any other, no thing could be an image of another—especially two things as complicated as two people. And to use them as such was to abuse them and delude oneself—that it was the coherence and ability of things (especially people) to be their unique and individual selves that allowed the malleability and richness of images to occur at all."

"She recalled her absurd attempt to construct an example—an image that, because it was constructed of things it simply did not fit, reversed the idea into an idea silly by itself, ridiculous in application—a ridiculousness that could easily, she saw, have strayed into the pernicious, the odious, or the destructive, depending on how widely one had insisted on applying it."

"Childhood is that time in which we never question the fact that every adult act is not only an autonomous occurrence in the universe, but that it is also filled, packed, overflowing with meaning, whether that meaning works for ill or good, whether the ill or good is or is not comprehended. Adulthood is that time in which we see that all human actions follow forms, whether well or badly, and it is the perseverance of the forms that is, whether for better or worse, their meaning. Various cultures make the transition at various ages, which transition period lasts for varying lengths of time, one accomplishing it in a week with careful dances, ancient prayers, and isolate and specified rituals; another, letting it take its own course, offering no help for it, and allowing it to run on frequently for years. But at the center of the changeover there is a period—whether it be a moment’s vision or a year-long suspicion—where the maturing youth sees all adult behavior as merely formal and totally meaningless."

"Her mother’s humpf mixed contempt with frustration. “You just don’t understand anything, do you? We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the world’s evils, only to find we’ve raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity!”"

"The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles."