Samuel Delany Quotes
Collection of top 74 famous quotes about Samuel Delany
Samuel Delany Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Samuel Delany quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn't black.
— Samuel R. Delany
An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit.
— Samuel R. Delany
As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
— Samuel R. Delany
The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
— Samuel R. Delany
There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.
— Samuel R. Delany
Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently.
— Samuel R. Delany
I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
— Samuel R. Delany
To live within the tethers of desire is - again and again - to be shocked at how far they have come loose from reason
— Samuel R. Delany
It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art.
— Samuel R. Delany
Rydra, when I look at the night and stars, it is only a passive act, but you are active even watching, and halo the stars with more luminous flame.
— Samuel R. Delany
It's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's
— Samuel R. Delany
Wind passed again; the iris shuddered about the diamond chip.
— Samuel R. Delany
He laughed. So you see, I'm not a nut. Not a real one, anyway. I haven't been a real nut in a long time.
— Samuel R. Delany
Things have made you what you are," she recited "What you are will make you what you will become.
— Samuel R. Delany
All life is a rhythm," she said as I sat up. "All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before liferesumes. — Samuel R. Delany
The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.
— Samuel R. Delany
She cut through worlds, and joined them - that's the important part - so that both became bigger.
— Samuel R. Delany
I do not say, however, that every delusion or wandering of the mind should be called madness. Erasmus of Rotterdam, The Praise of Folly There
— Samuel R. Delany
Pain ... after you've lived with it long enough, isn't pain anymore. It's something else.
— Samuel R. Delany
Bear in mind that the novelno matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective
is always an historical projection of its own time. — Samuel R. Delany
They were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice.
— Samuel R. Delany
If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.
— Samuel R. Delany
Most people here have spent most of their time someplace else. You learn
— Samuel R. Delany
From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.
— Samuel R. Delany
To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.
— Samuel R. Delany
In the cups, one after another, glistening disks rose, black without translucence.
— Samuel R. Delany
Bellona used to be a pretty good town.
— Samuel R. Delany
I heard Bellona was where it was at. It must be, now. I'm here.
— Samuel R. Delany
Down, everybody! Down on all fours! We're going to show you our new step! Like this: just swing your up and -
— Samuel R. Delany
The strange machinery by which a reputation precedes its source we all know is faulty. Yet how much faith we put in it!
— Samuel R. Delany
Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.
— Samuel R. Delany
It's only ... when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.
— Samuel R. Delany
I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.
— Samuel R. Delany
If people are busy living out myths you don't like, leave them to it.
— Samuel R. Delany
Reality must prove itself again and again to questioners ... it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself.
— Samuel R. Delany
You give me so much pleasure, why should I ever want to hurt you?
— Samuel R. Delany
The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.
— Samuel R. Delany
Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).
— Samuel R. Delany
Suggestion is a literary strategy.
— Samuel R. Delany
You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough.
— Samuel R. Delany
Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.
— Samuel R. Delany
It is 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
The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.
— Samuel R. Delany
Bitch, on that world, was what men called women they were extremely fond of or extremely displeased with when the woman was not there.
— Samuel R. Delany
Honesty is the best policy ; a policy is, after all, a strategy for living in the polis in the city ...
— Samuel R. Delany
The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.
— Samuel R. Delany
You are trapped in that bright moment where you learned your doom
— Samuel R. Delany
In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.
— Samuel R. Delany
He shrugged. Confusion was like struggling to find the proper way to sit inside his skin.
— Samuel R. Delany
This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain.
— Samuel R. Delany
Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.
— Samuel R. Delany
Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep.
— Samuel R. Delany
If you are angle, I am complement. If you are circle, I am circumscribed.
— Samuel R. Delany
Do you follow the wrestling? Most people think it's illegal, but you can watch it there. Ruby and Python are on display this evening.
— Samuel R. Delany
I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.
— Samuel R. Delany
The truth is always multiplex.
— Samuel R. Delany
You do not need an identity to become yourself; you need an identity to become -like- someone else.
— Samuel R. Delany
'Dhalgren' is the kind of book in which you can look for pretty much anything you want. I tried to put as much into it as I could at the time.
— Samuel R. Delany
Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.
— Samuel R. Delany
He wanted to talk and had nothing to say.
— Samuel R. Delany
The rich are always enamored of the ancient.
— Samuel R. Delany
Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life.
— Samuel R. Delany
Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.
— Samuel R. Delany
It's easy to repeat; it's hard to speak,
— Samuel R. Delany
Jo, you're you. And that's as important as you want to make it.
— Samuel R. Delany
Presumptuous bastard,' Tak said. 'Sunset? He might at least wait and see if there's a tomorrow morning.
— Samuel R. Delany
Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.
— Samuel R. Delany
Human beings being what they are, order spreads, given half a chance, almost as fast as confusion.
— Samuel R. Delany
It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now.
— Samuel R. Delany
Will sex between humans ever lose its endlessly repeated history?
— Samuel R. Delany
The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman.
— Samuel R. Delany