Samuel R. Delany quotes - page 5

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)
It is the rare society that does not abuse its artists. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
What makes a boy interesting does not make a man interesting. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
Could it be, he wondered, he'd only thought he'd seen what he'd seen because of his own desires, researches, expectations? View quote
Samuel R. Delany
I'm a public man, my princess. That means my only meaning is the web of signs I publicly inhabit. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
I still feel that style is important for reading pleasure, and sex is important for pleasure in life. Each appeases a different type of desire. And while I find nothing shameful in taking direct erotic pleasure from reading or writing, I don't think they entail a necessary relation. The processes you have me describing are contingent psychological processes. Neither marks one end nor the other of any necessary or even philosophical relationship... View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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! (Samuel R. Delany)
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
Sincerity is my favorite form of belligerence. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
Science fiction isn't just thinking about the world out there. It's also thinking about how that world might be-a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they're going to change the world we live in, they-and all of us-have to be able to think about a world that works differently. View quote
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
I want to talk about love. Loving someone...I mean really loving someone...means you are willing to admit that the person you love is not what you first fell in love with, not the image you first had; and you must be able to like them still for being as close to that image as they are, and avoid disliking them for being so far away. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
And who's to say where life ceases and theater begins-. (Samuel R. Delany)
Ah ha!” the Spike said. "I think we have just gotten down to a gritty-or at least a nitty. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
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. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
‘To write for others,' she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy-or a teller of tales.' View quote
Samuel R. Delany
‘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.' View quote
Samuel R. Delany