Samuel R. Delany Quotes

It means you don’t like where you’ve been, the place where you are is grim, and the only place you see yourself going is not an improvement on what’s gone before.

But as soon as any of us dies, there is only the monster left. What I had been pursuing was not Belham but the monster called Belham. And what my whole journey had taught me was precisely what sort of monster it was: it was made, as all such monsters are, of contradiction, supposition, miscalculation, impossibility, and ignorance.

What I look for in a friend is someone who's different from me. The more different the person is, the more I'll learn from him. The more he'll come up with surprising takes on ideas and things and situations.

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.

I came no nearer sleep than I came to the moon.

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

Men and women are less than a chromosome apart.

Whoever heard of La-ing or Lo-ing somebody you’re herding goats with, or laughing with, or making love with.

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

Appearances are signs of possibilities, at least when one remembers that what appears may be a sign by masking as easily as by manifesting.

I confess, the Amnewor is new to me. Yes, I’ve heard the name—as a minor fact in some other god’s story. Precisely what it did, though, I can’t remember. That, of course, makes it more intriguing. Death. It was associated with endless, mindless, pointless death. But which of them isn’t?

One cannot truly trace the course of a life in a thousand pages. Let us have the reticence here not to attempt it in a thousand words.

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

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

At a certain point I came to the conclusion that one of the murderous aspects of the AIDS crisis was that people were used to not talking about sexual experiences in detail. Gay sex for instance does not cause AIDS. There are certain acts that transmit a virus and there are certain other acts that don’t transmit a virus. If you don’t talk about what goes on in sexuality, so that you know what particular acts you’re dealing with, then I think you're, possibly in an indirect way but never-the-less in a very real way, contributing to an atmosphere of ignorance which the result is people die.