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

About drafting all the scientific students into the war effort. Maybe the war is good, but, Tomar, I’m working on my own project. All at once, the thing I want most in the world is to be left alone to work on it. And I want you, and I want to have a picnic. I’m nearly at the solution, and to have to stop and work on bomb sightings and missile trajectories…Tomar, there’s a beauty in abstract mathematics that shouldn’t be dulled with that sort of thing.

In this random, chaotic world, filled with apes and demigods and all in between, where mass murder and assassination is the past time of the hour, where any structure you cling to may topple in a moment, where a City of a Thousand Suns may be destroyed by a machine commanded by the psychosis of an empire and beauty doubts itself as insanity gorged on death—and I am free”—again he drew in his breath—“what am I free to do? You tell me what I am free to do!

When what is is congruent to what is supposed the reaction is functional and the mental processes competent. When what is and what is supposed to have nothing to do with each other the choice of reactions is random. Something tears. Stay or run, laugh or frown: the decision is chance.