Samuel R. Delany Quotes

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 was born," the Mouse said. "I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you.

Origins are always constructs, always contouring ideological agendas.

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

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

The deconstructionists have led off this set of new readings most energetically by asking of certain texts: “What do they have to say that specifically undermines and subverts their own ideological array?” As energetic as the deconstructionist foray has been, we must remember that there are still going to be many texts for which we can expect the answer: “Not much.”

He was learning that power—the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations—was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.

What real power can buy, of course, is anonymity.

We're not going to climb that in the dark, are we?" asked Iimmi.
"Better than in the light," said Urson. "This way you can't see how far you have to fall.

Bayle turned to watch the drifting mists along the shore and thought: In three days we have eaten with this Captain four times, talked with him about navigation, his three families, his collection of miniature clay idols, and have all decided he is a deep and impressive, if somewhat absentminded man. Yes, save I take this same ship returning, I may never see him again. Strange are the ways of travel.

The doll? Who decided that the young should rehearse the physical care of infants, so that they know them as objects to be bounced, cuddled, or abandoned when boring before they know their own, real infants as living beings full of the responsiveness anterior to language that is the basis of all expressed reason?

Gorgik began to learn that most valuable of lessons without which no social progress is possible: If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.

With adolescence, Pryn had certainly taken on the sometimes troubling knowledge that almost anything with an outside and an inside supporting movement from one to the other could be sexually suggestive.

What references she’d overheard were all oblique enough so that, without knowing what they referred to, she’d have no way to interpret them and so hadn’t really heard them at all.

All life is a rhythm," she said as I sat up. "All death is rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes.