Samuel R. Delany

Quotes

1. Oh, for the rebirth of an educational system where understanding was an essential part of knowledge.

   p. 26

2. 

   “What do you see, Captain?”

   “Two boys with hands locked for a fight. You see how one is light and the other is dark? I see love against death, light against darkness, chaos against order. I see the clash of all opposites under...the sun. I see Prince and myself.”

   “Which is which?”

   “I don’t know, Mouse.”

   p. 119

3. 

   You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough.

   p. 36

4. 

   Difference is the foundation of those buildings, the pilings beneath the docks, tangled in the roots of the trees. Half the place was built on it. The other half couldn’t live without it. But to talk about it in public reveals you to be ill-mannered and vulgar.

5. 

   “The aristocracy,” she repeated. “At its worst, a sargasso of every conceivable neurosis society may have; by naming itself it has agreed to its own death. But at least it has had the dignity to applaud its own order of execution in the past if the document is eloquent.”

   p. 365

6. 

   The army is just too easy and too simple: fight to the death for the cause is just.

   p. 326

7. 

   Our parents saw each of us marrying, settling down, but certainly not with one another.

   p. 389

8. 

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

9. 

   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.

   p. 347

10. 

    Books! Real books were Joneny’s delight. Heavy, cumbersome, difficult to store, they were the bane of most scholars. Joneny found them entrancing. He didn’t care what was in them. Any book today was so old that each word glittered to him like the facet of a lost gem. The whole conception of a book was so at odds with this compressed, crowded, breakneck era that he was put into ecstasy by the simple heft of the paper. His own collection, some seventy volumes, was considered a pretentious luxury by everyone at the University.

11. 

    I was thinking about what I said to you about customs and morals keeping people apart, making them different from one another. People are so much more alike than different. So much more.

    p. 327

12. 

    I saw a bunch of the weirdest, oddest people I have ever met in my life, who thought different, and acted different, and even made love different. And they made me laugh, and get angry, and be happy, and be sad, and excited, and even fall in love a little....And they didn’t seem to be so weird or strange anymore.