Top 120 Samuel R. Delany Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The strange machinery by which a reputation precedes its source we all know is faulty. Yet how much faith we put in it!”

— Samuel R. Delany

52. “I am limited, finite, and fixed. I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on. I commend myself up to what is greater than I, and try to be good.”

— Samuel R. Delany

53. “Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there’s so much of it, blaring in through the five senses.”

— Samuel R. Delany

54. “It’s a beautiful universe... wondrous and the more exciting because no one has written plays and poems and built sculptures to indicate the structure of desire I negotiate every day as I move about in it.”

— Samuel R. Delany

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

— Samuel R. Delany

56. “Power is all. Another falsification; I do not tell how I gain or maintain it. I only record the ginger stroll through the vaguely fetid garden of its rewards.”

— Samuel R. Delany

57. “Human beings being what they are, order spreads, given half a chance, almost as fast as confusion.”

— Samuel R. Delany

58. “He laughed. “So you see, I’m not a nut. Not a real one, anyway. I haven’t been a real nut in a long time.”

— Samuel R. Delany

59. “In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.”

— Samuel R. Delany

60. “The sad truth is, S –, most people are not writers. This has nothing to do with literacy – or intelligence, or general culture. There are people who can correct the grammar, spelling, diction, and style of a college English paper with the best of them – who are still not writers. Indeed, most of what gets published in books, magazines, and newspapers is not written by real writers – which is one reason why so much of it is so bad.”

— Samuel R. Delany

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

— Samuel R. Delany

62. “Do they have this word, I?’ “As a matter of fact they have three forms of it: I-below-a-temperature-of-six-degrees-centigrade, I-between-six-and-ninety-three-degrees-centigrade, and I-above-ninety-three.” The Butcher looked confused. “It has to do with their reproductive process,” Rydra explained. “When the temperature is below six degrees they’re sterile. They can only conceive when the temperature is between six and ninety-three, but to actually give birth, they have to be above ninety-three.”

— Samuel R. Delany

63. “The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectators experience should be identical to, or have anything to do with, the artist’s. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.”

— Samuel R. Delany

64. “Jo, you’re you. And that’s as important as you want to make it.”

— Samuel R. Delany

65. “The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman.”

— Samuel R. Delany

66. “If people are busy living out myths you don’t like, leave them to it.”

— Samuel R. Delany

67. “There is so much you don’t see. You walk around in a world with holes in it; you stumble into them; and get hurt.”

— Samuel R. Delany

68. “You give me so much pleasure, why should I ever want to hurt you?”

— Samuel R. Delany

69. “Who am I talking to other than myself here? Someone I hope who at least knows my languages.”

— Samuel R. Delany

70. “I do not say, however, that every delusion or wandering of the mind should be called madness. Erasmus of Rotterdam, The Praise of Folly There.”

— Samuel R. Delany

71. “He stopped, because he wasn’t sure what Cryptography had established, and because he needed another moment to haul himself down from the ledges of her high cheekbones, to retreat from the caves of her eyes.”

— Samuel R. Delany

72. “The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.”

— Samuel R. Delany

73. “Inside the Mouse, surprise opened like a wound over the inevitable.”

— Samuel R. Delany

74. “All the misunderstandings that tie the world up and keep people apart were quivering before me at once, waiting for me to untangle them, explain them, and I couldn’t. I didn’t know the words, the grammar, the syntax.”

— Samuel R. Delany

75. “The particular verbal freedom of SF, coupled with the corrective process that allows the whole range of the physically explainable universe, can produce the most violent leaps of imagery. For not only does it throw us worlds away, it specifies how we got there.”

— Samuel R. Delany

76. “To live within the tethers of desire is – again and again – to be shocked at how far they have come loose from reason.”

— Samuel R. Delany

77. “Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.”

— Samuel R. Delany

78. “Right now I’m just a bright guy with a lot to say and nothing to say it about.”

— Samuel R. Delany

79. “Bellona used to be a pretty good town.”

— Samuel R. Delany

80. “It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.”

— Samuel R. Delany

81. “I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is – which I’m a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight.”

— Samuel R. Delany

82. “I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.”

— Samuel R. Delany

83. “How we treat our invalids – our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members – does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally.”

— Samuel R. Delany

84. “Lots of people do things lots better than lots of others; but, today, so many people do so many things very well, and so many people are seriously interested in so many different things people do for their own different reasons, you can’t call any thing the best for every person, or even every serious person. So you just pay real attention to the real things that affect you; and don’t waste your time knocking the rest.”

— Samuel R. Delany

85. “That seemed to be, if anything, the power of writing – to hold sway over memory, making it public, keeping it private, possibly, even, keeping it secret from oneself –.”

— Samuel R. Delany

86. “Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.”

— Samuel R. Delany

87. “If the situation of a technological society was such that there could be no direct relation between a man’s work and his modus vivendi, other than money, at least he must feel that he is directly changing things by his work, shaping things, making things that weren’t there before, moving things from one place to another. He must exert energy in his work and see these changes occur with his own eyes. Otherwise he would feel his life was futile.”

— Samuel R. Delany

88. “Bear in mind that the novel – no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective – is always an historical projection of its own time.”

— Samuel R. Delany

89. “I wonder sometimes if the purpose of the artistic community isn’t to provide a concerned social matrix which simultaneously assures that no member, regardless of honors or approbation, has the slightest idea of the worth of his own work.” Kidd.”

— Samuel R. Delany

90. “The father-mother-son that makes up the basic family unit, at least as the Family has described it for centuries now, represents a power structure, a structure of strong powers, mediating powers, and subordinate powers, as well as paths for power developments and power restrictions.”

— Samuel R. Delany

91. “Shiftrunes?” “Letters that are pronounced one way on their first occurrence in a text, another on their second, another on their third, and so on in a fixed sequence. It gives the poet an interesting technique to exploit: she can have pairs of words that alliterate visually but not phonetically as well as pairs that alliterate phonetically but not visually. And she can play the two off against each other.”

— Samuel R. Delany

92. “And on the worlds of five galaxies, now, people delve your imagery and meaning for the answers to the riddles of language, love, and isolation.” The three words jumped his sentence like vagabonds on a boxcar.”

— Samuel R. Delany

93. “Do you think a city can control the way the people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?”

— Samuel R. Delany

94. “But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you’re lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense-stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety-is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself... in a way other people just can’t.”

— Samuel R. Delany

95. “What you are will make you what you will become.”

— Samuel R. Delany

96. “As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.”

— Samuel R. Delany

97. “Well, thinking about what’s not supposed to require thinking, that is philosophy, no?”

— Samuel R. Delany

98. “An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit.”

— Samuel R. Delany

99. “I can think of no series of words that could appear in a piece of naturalistic fiction that could not also appear in the same order in a piece of speculative fiction. I can, however, think of many series of words that, while fine for speculative fiction, would be meaningless as naturalism. Which then is the major and which the subcategory?”

— Samuel R. Delany

100. “Down, everybody! Down on all fours! We’re going to show you our new step! Like this: just swing your up and –.”

— Samuel R. Delany