Samuel R. Delany Quotes

Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don’t you think?

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.

You have to grow all the time," I said. "Not necessarily get bigger. But inside your head you have to grow, kid-boy. For us human-type people, that's what's important. And that kind of growing never stops. At least, it shouldn't. You can grow, kid-boy, or you can die. That's the choice you've got, and it goes on all of your life.

I was thinking about what I said to you about customs and morals keeping people apart, making them different from one another. People are so much more alike than different. So much more.

But it's always intriguing to discover the ways in which desire fuels the systems of the world.

Men and women are less than a chromosome apart.

Look, if he’s alive, there’s nothing we have to do about it. If he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do.

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.

You’re you, Jo. You’re you and everything that went into you, from the way you sit for hours and watch Di’k when you want to think, to the way you turn a tenth of a second faster in response to something blue than to something red. You’re all you ever thought, all you ever hoped, and all you ever hated, too. And all you've learned.

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

He sat cross-legged in the crumpled, body-warmed bedding, now, and looked at her beside him until his eyes ached with keeping his lids up, looking not to miss the beauty of her breathing, the faint flare of her nostrils, the rise of her chest, the movement of her skin a millimetre back and forth across her collarbone as she breathed. His eyes, flooded with her gloriousness, filled with tears. He had to blink and look away.

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

The beginning of the end, the beginning of the end," muttered Lo Hawk. "We must preserve something."
"The end of the beginning," sighed La Dire. "Everything must change.

So," said Raven, "once again tonight we are presented with a mysterious sign and no way to know whether it completes a pattern or destroys one.

That’s the trouble with spies, you know. It’s not that they carry information. It’s that they carry fragmentary information, out of context, misconstrued, badly interpreted, incomplete, and misread.