Quotes by Samuel R. Delany

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 cant express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesnt hurt any more: thats my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.

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 like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you cant be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.

Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

I don’t 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 look at you, read a word you write, or consider you in any situation, no matter whether the roof is falling in or the money is pouring in, without saying to him- or herself (whether in an attempt to count it or to discount it), Negro... The racial situation, permeable as it might sometimes seem (and it is, yes, highly permeable), is nevertheless your total surround. Don’t you ever forget it...! And I never have.

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 didnt even know were there. Everything changes.

One picks ones 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 good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora.

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

But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if youre lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense-stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety-is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself... in a way other people just cant.

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, hold all together or sunder it.

We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the worlds evils, only to find weve raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity!

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 exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of ‘she’, during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to.

The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman.

Sometimes you want to say things, and youre missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. Thats how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesnt exist.

...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 hindsight, I suppose the reason that I want to close on a consideration of these words is that the moon-solid progress through high, drifting cumulus is — read them again — at the very opposite of what we perceive on a liquids tilting and untilting top, and so becomes the other privileged pole among the images of this study, this essay, this memoir. Or perhaps, as it is only a clause whose syntactic place has been questioned by my own unscholarly researches, I merely want to fix it before it vanishes like water, like light, like the play between them we only suggest, but never master, with the word motion.

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 loved are moments the very memory of which constitutes the beginning of a strategy to live in a world where such horrors exist.

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 am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. I am someone in that room; I am—

The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

Youve blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? Its as though I cannot even remember what I once desired. All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself-- and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified-- at least thats what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart. In a single gesture youve turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which youve shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I dont have it.

And his left nipple was centimetres above my right eye. I wanted to lean my head back and lick it – not from desire but from that idiocy always there to subvert desire and render it ludicrous. Our human heat was a third creature bevelling between us.

Desire isn’t appeased by its object, only irritated into something more than desire that can join with the stars to inform the chaotic heavens with sense.