Quotes by Samuel R. Delany

“All life is a rhythm, she said as I sat up. All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before liferesumes.”

“You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnis...”

“In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, she is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of woman. The ancient, dimorphic form he, once used excl...”

“The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman.”

“I dont know whether Asimov realized he was saying this as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever...”

“But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense-stranger than the hallucinations, or the ...”

“In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is ...”

“You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything ...”

“Because feelings, emotional and physical, are so foregrounded in sexual encounters, the orgy is soon the most social of human interchanges, where awareness and communication, whether verbal or no, ...”

“Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once...”

“One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define...”

“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 sh...”

“...I looked out the window at walls of moonlit cloud rising beside us as though we we were at the bottom of some, gray and ivory canyon, hung above the moon-smashed sea...But, with whatever hindsig...”

“Its a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectators experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artists”

“ABSTRACT THOUGHTS in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translat...”

“Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.”

“Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.”

“When I was packing those, I caught myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment com...”

“Those moments when we learn that mothers rage and fathers kill, that friends betray and authority is fallible, or that our own blank, innocent ignorance can destroy the pure, the good, and the love...”

“An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented . I...”