Quotes from Samuel R. Delany

Appreciation is not a warm feeling, Rydra realized, but cool, and makes your back relax at the same time that you smile.

I'm eccentric, yes, but I'm not insane.

Look, when you come up short against the edge like that, when you discover the earth really is round, when you find out you've killed your father and married your mother after all, or when you look at the horizon and see something, like that, rising — man, you have to have some sort of human reaction: laugh, cry, sing, something! You can't just lie down and take a nap.

Uma consciência multiplexa sempre faz perguntas quando precisa.

A glib wisdom holds that people like this just don't want relationships. They have "problems with intimacy." But the salient fact is: These were relationships. In Tommy's case, in Gary's, and in several others they were relationships that lasted years. Intimacy for most of us is a condition that endures, however often repeated, for minutes or for hours. And these all had their many intimate hours. But, like all sane relationships, they also had limits.

What'd they call it?" "An orchid." "Yeah, that's what it is." He walked over, squatted in the triple beam. "You wear it around your wrist. With the blades sticking out front. Like a bracelet." From an adjustable metal wrist-band, seven blades, from eight to twelve inches, curved sharply forward. There was a chain-and-leather harness inside to hold it steady on the fingers. The blades were sharpened along the outside.

The over-determined human mind would rather have everything relevant, even if the relevance is simple-minded.

Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by. Rumor says there is practically no power here. Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that such a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull, to the electric nation! It is a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions.

While a name is always something you can choose, it only functions socially as long as I call you by it. (And try calling people names that they don't choose to be called by, if you want to see some real social unrest.)

His bare foot was calloused enough for gravel and glass. But ash kept working between his foot and his remaining sandal to grind like finest sand, work its way under, and silt itself with his sweat. His heel was almost sore.

next half dozen papers went from July 14, 2022, to July 7, 1837 (Headline: ONLY ONE HUNDRED YEARS TILL THE DEATH OF HARLOW!)

Bellona has become a city of strange—" he burlesqued the word with a drawl—"craftsmen. Ah, the notions that are engineered here! Orchids, light-shields, that chain you're wearing—our local folk art.

People probably do hear watches go tic-tok. But I'm sure my childhood clock went tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic…Why

You got dandruff in your crotch?" "That's not dandruff. I was with a woman. Just before I met you. Only I didn't get a chance to wash." "Was she sick?" "Naw. Didn't you ever fuck a woman?

Poetry is what is avoided as it is surrounded by translation.

And for a moment (and only a moment), it was as if a gap between two absolute and unquestionably separated columns or encampments of the world had suddenly revealed itself as illusory; that what I had assumed two was really one; and that the glacial solidity of the boundary I'd been sure existed between them was as permeable as shimmering water, as shifting light.

Tarzan,' I said, 'if my old lady wants to fuck a sheep with a dildo strapped to her nose, that is largely her concern, very secondarily mine, and not yours at all. She can fuck anything she wants—with the possible exception of you.

If only because there is so much to know in our human universe, the working assumption you can go on is: You may assume, about absolutely any fact (how many transuranic elements are there? why does cold water remove human blood stains faster than hot?) that nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand do NOT know it- which goes for the working assumption too.

She said something unprintable. When she finished there were tears starting on her lower lids. "What I want to say, what I want to express I just…"Again she shook her head. "I can't say it." "If you want to keep growing as a poet, you'll have to.

There is nothing safe about the darkness of this city and its stink. Well, I have abrogated all claim to safety, coming here. It is better to discuss it as though I had chosen. That keeps the scrim of sanity before the awful set. What will lift it?

I think, sometimes, the difference is that they are sure that any social structures that arise grow out of patterns innate to The Sex Act—whatever that is; while we have seen, again and again, that the psychology, structures, and acoutrements that define any sex act are always internalized from social structures that already exist, that have been created, that can changed.

Loving someone... I mean really loving someone... means you are willing to admit the person you love is not what you first fell in love with, not the image you first had; and you must be able to like them still for being as close to that image as they are, and avoid disliking them for being so far away.

I recited in Hebrew, "'Truth and peace form the foundation of the world …

When doctors think they've eradicated a disease, they stop looking for it. So if the disease itself suddenly shows up again, they may not even recognize it; they may even mistake it for an entirely new one.