Samuel R. Delany Quotes

Perhaps coming from the royal family, I had easier emotional access to a sense of Toromon’s history. Even at its best, that’s all an aristocracy is good for.

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

The parts I like, well..." He shook his head, with pursed lips. "They just don't have anything to do with me: somebody else wrote them, it seems, about things I may have thought about once. The parts I don't like--well, I can remember writing those, oh yeah, word by word by word.

Finally I just had to get out. Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for whatever purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that’s what is, as far as she’s concerned.

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.

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!

Her mother’s humpf mixed contempt with frustration. “You just don’t understand anything, do you? 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 sheer stupidity!”

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

Simply turn them loose in the haze of their own injured psyches and they will create an enemy, greater and more malignant than any a psychologist could create for them, always hidden behind their own terror.

It is far easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.

…the science fiction community is not, and was not especially back then, a gay-friendly organization…

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.

Our parents saw each of us marrying, settling down, but certainly not with one another.

If you're going to do something stupid—and we all do—it might as well be a brave and foolish thing.

I must remember my own origins. Once I was as ignorant as you; I swear, though, I can’t remember when.