Samuel R. Delany

Quotes

1. You see, the poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damage.

   p. 390

2. 

   You’re you, Jo. You’re you and everything that went into you, from the way you sit for hours and watch Di’k when you want to think, to the way you turn a tenth of a second faster in response to something blue than to something red. You’re all you ever thought, all you ever hoped, and all you ever hated, too. And all you've learned.

   p. 180

3. 

   “As time progresses,” Lump stated, “people learn. That’s the only hope.”

   p. 197

4. 

   Maybe that’s the most important thing there is, Lump. If there is an answer to that question, Lump, that’s what it is, to know you’re yourself and nobody else.

   p. 180

5. 

   “The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.”

   “Is that true?”

   “I don’t know.”

   p. 190

6. 

   “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!”

   p. 391

7. 

   They did not realize that reality must prove itself again and again to questioners, and that it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself under logical rigour. The idea of asking questions was almost impossible; but only almost.

   p. 275

8. 

   They could all know now if they wanted, but they are too embarrassed. Rolth, for three thousand years everyone has tried to find a word to differentiate men from other animals; some of the ancients called him the laughing animal, some the moral animal. Well, I wonder if he isn’t the embarrassed animal.

   p. 294

9. 

   Perhaps coming from the royal family, I had easier emotional access to a sense of Toromon’s history. Even at its best, that’s all an aristocracy is good for.

   p. 62

10. 

    Simply turn them loose in the haze of their own injured psyches and they will create an enemy, greater and more malignant than any a psychologist could create for them, always hidden behind their own terror.

    p. 275

11. 

    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.

    p. 64

12. 

    Jon was surprised. “You don’t believe that military discipline can be a good experience?”

    “Experience is what you make it,” the officer said. “That’s real profound, huh? Boys into men? Look at the guys who like the army, or even do well there. Guys who hate the random inconsistency of their parents so much they are willing to give up love to get a father who hands out his orders by a book of rules you can run and check in the library, even if the rule is go out and die. You’ll do a lot better if you come to terms with the father you already have than by running off to the state substitute.”

    Despite drunkenness, the man was maintaining logic, so Jon went on, “but doesn’t the army give you a fairly rigorous microcosm to work out certain problems of…well, honour and morality, at least for yourself—”

    “Sure,” drawled the officer, “a microcosm totally safe, completely unreal, free of women and children, where God is the general and the Devil is death, and you’re playing for keeps—the excuse for conducting everything with high seriousness. It was all set up to make the most destructive and illogical human actions appear as controlled and non-random as possible.

    p. 324