Samuel R. Delany

If everything, everything were known, statistical estimates would be unnecessary. The science of probability gives mathematical expression to our ignorance, not to our wisdom.

To be a bandit is better than to be a slave!

You see, the poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damage.

We have done a tiny bit to free the darkies in this country. But the devil is still very much our slave. (p. 60)

I’m a public man, my princess. That means my only meaning is the web of signs I publicly inhabit.

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.

to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society's values, can force it to change."
"Is that true?"
"I don't know.

In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.

For better or for worse, she found herself putting aside fear in favor of curiosity.

That’s the army. But our job was to make the rest of you think it was safe and glorious and good, too. Boys into men? Discipline that isn’t self-discipline doesn’t mean thing to a boy.

Nevertheless, I still wonder. Each of us, with money, gets further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket—not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing.

As morning branded the sea, darkness fell away at the far side of the beach. I turned to follow it.

All you are seeing is your own nostalgia for your girlhood trips up here into the hills, which were no doubt colored with the pleasantries of youth and idealism, which is—won’t you admit it?—finally just a form of ignorance.

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.