Samuel R. Delany Quotes

As time progresses," Lump stated, "people learn. That's the only hope.

What are you doing here?" I asked at last.
"Probably the same thing you are."
"What's that?"
She looked serious. "Why don't you tell me?"
I went back to my knife. "Sharpening my machete."
"I'm sharpening my mind," she said. "There is something to be done that will require an edge on both.

Always remember the objects you are working with. When you make a bridge, remember you are putting steel on stone and dirt. … Some day you will write poems to a little girl: marks with ink on paper. … When you are making love, you are moving flesh against flesh. That is the basis of all magic. (p. 30)

The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts, but that it generates a way of thinking.

Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep.

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

Earth, the world, the fifth planet from the sun—the species that stands on two legs and roams this thin wet crust: it’s changing, Lobey. It’s not the same. Some people walk under the sun and accept that change, others close their eyes, clap their hands to their ears, and deny the world with their tongues.

“Gods are nothing but low blood sugar,” I said. “St. Augustine, Peyote Indians…you know how it works—

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.

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.

It’s a good idea, when people are curious, to give them something to sustain that curiosity—and direct it.

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.

Half dead’s a lot worse than dead, when you know you’re gonna die in another three, six days no matter what anyone else does.

You understand, Pryn, I don’t believe in any of it: magic, miracles, religion, the calling of the gods, named or unnamed.

To be morally upset about how other people take their sexual pleasure is surely the weirdest human quirk ever.