# Flight from Neveryon

- Author: [Samuel R. Delany](https://www.leafyquotes.com/samuel-r-delany.md)
- Quotes: 25
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/samuel-r-delany/flight-from-neveryon

## Quotes

> I felt, and still feel, that it is important for fantasy to have a grasp of the complexity of fact, if not of factual content.

p. 372

> 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.

p. 302

> The audience’s performance is always more or less stochastic.

p. 336

> The artist’s performance is always more or less aleatory.

p. 334

> Yes, I learned about monsters on that trip. And I learned about them in these encounters afterward:
>
> First, monsters are real.
>
> Second, they are us.

p. 318

> I believe art is a wholly formal enterprise, encompassing almost all the tenets that the nineteenth century spoke of as l’art pour l’art, tenets which have made twentieth century’s experimentation possible. (What postmodern doesn’t?)

p. 273

> We moved toward that precipice with a motion as inexorable as that with which time takes us toward our death.

p. 348

> Origins are always constructs, always contouring ideological agendas.

p. 368

> 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.”

p. 380

> In a sense, modern philosophy is a series of introductions to introductions to introductions, the movement between them controlled by the pro-tective/pro-textive play of forces about desire.

p. 368

> Men and women are less than a chromosome apart.

p. 374

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

p. 111

> But whatever you say of them, finally I had to dismiss such notions as the ratiocinations desire can entangle about the most sensible of us.

p. 164

> It is the rare society that does not abuse its artists.

p. 216

> What makes a boy interesting does not make a man interesting.

p. 136

> Life is hard for everyone, and we must not take credit ourselves for the little that others can do with theirs. Rather look instead to whom we can give credit, if not thanks, for what little we have been able to do with our own.

p. 134

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

p. 215

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

p. 9

> But that kind has not a true word in him. I wouldn’t be surprised if everything he said were a lie. Such as he lies as he breathes. Truth is something he’s never even learned to speak.

p. 123

> If all human production (aesthetic or otherwise) has its documentary aspect (i.e., it can be associated, by a knowledgeable reader, with a time and place), does this endanger its aesthetic aspects per se? It is the richness of the pattern that is aesthetically at stake. How many art histories does it take to make us understand that reference (a use context) and historicity are not the same?

p. 241

> 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?

p. 273

> Content, of course, must have some form. And form, of course, creates its content/commentary. This is why their chimeras have chased each other through moment after moment of history, the intense perception of one or the other producing the overwhelming effect: Art.

p. 232

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

p. 248

> Life, I sometimes think—like dreams, like stories, like plans, even like lies if you will—is to be pondered on, interpreted, interrogated: but you had best not try to change it too radically in the middle, or you risk never finding its secret.

p. 109

> Could it be, he wondered, he’d only thought he’d seen what he’d seen because of his own desires, researches, expectations?

p. 117