# Triton

- Author: [Samuel R. Delany](https://www.leafyquotes.com/samuel-r-delany.md)
- Quotes: 12
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/samuel-r-delany/triton

## Quotes

> She simply has no concept of what’s real and what’s fantasy—did I say? She’s in the theater.

p. 322

> Let me tell you a secret. There is a difference between men and women, a little, tiny one that, I’m afraid, has probably made most of your adult life miserable and will probably continue to make it so till you die. The difference is simply that women have only really been treated, by that bizarre, Derkheimian abstraction, “society,” as human beings for the last—oh, say sixty-five years; and then, really, only on the moons; whereas men have had the luxury of such treatment for the last four thousand. The result of this historical anomaly is simply that, on a statistical basis, women are just a little less willing to put up with certain kinds of shit than men—simply because the concept of a certain kind of shit-free Universe is, in that equally bizarre Jungian abstraction, the female “collective unconscious,” too new and too precious.

p. 252

> Political commitment isn’t a perimeter, Sam; it’s a parameter. Don’t you ever wonder? Don’t you ever doubt?

p. 140

> “Ah ha!” the Spike said. “I think we have just gotten down to a gritty—or at least a nitty.”

p. 123

> You should always tell the truth, she thought, not because one lie leads to another, but rather because one lie could so easily lead you to that terrifying position from which, with just the help of a random dream, you can see, both back and ahead, the morass where truth and falsity are simply, for you, indistinguishable.

p. 329

> Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently.

p. 266

> And who’s to say where life ceases and theater begins—

p. 113

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

p. 54

> The whole problem, I suppose, is that any time some piece of communication strikes poor Fred, or any of the remaining Beasts, for that matter, as possibly meaningful—or is it meaningless? It’s been explained to me a dozen times and I still can’t get it right—anyway, his religious convictions say he has to either stop it or—barring that—refuse to be a party to it.

p. 113

> Finally I just had to get out. Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for whatever purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that’s what is, as far as she’s concerned.

p. 322

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

p. 363

> You seem to be using some sort of logical system where when you get near any explanation, you say: “By definition my problem is insoluble. Now that explanation over there would solve it. But since I’ve defined my problem as insoluble, then by definition that solution doesn’t apply.”

p. 123