Quotes from Samuel R. Delany

We are the ink in which are written other messages that we cannot even understand.

Katin tried to look reservedly doubtful. The expression was too complicated and came out blank.

You can program a computer to make mistakes, and you do it not by crossing wires, but by manipulating the 'language' you teach it to 'think' in.

Truth is what's important in the world. But is what's important always the truth?

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.

in a universe where both information and misinformation are constantly suspect, reviewed and drifing as they must be (constantly) by and between the two, a moment when either information or misinformation turns out to be harmless must bloom, when surrounded by the workings of desire and terror, into the offered sign of all about it, making and marking all about it innocent by contamination.

It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfections on to another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies. Ortega y Gasset, On Love

a little town on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees there is only one barber. This barber shaves all the men in the town who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself or not?

The inevitable is that unprepared for.

Neurotics proceed with delusions of grandeur. Napoleon Bonaparte take the lead. Jesus Christ bring up the rear.

All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you've held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute.

Wind passed again; the iris shuddered about the diamond chip.

Well, thinking about what's not supposed to require thinking, that is philosophy, no?

You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express—and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt anymore: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.

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.

When I was packing those, I caught myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could – nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment compound I'd gotten permission to riffle had put up a whole shelf full of cubes of women writers or texts about women. She was convinced nobody could be truly educated unless they'd read them – though nobody I ever met had, except her, maybe. […]

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.

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

I will probably be caught again, because that's what happens to criminals in this universe. And maybe I will escape once more." He shrugged. "Maybe I will not be caught again, though." He looked at her, surprised not at her but at something in himself. "I was no I before, but now there is a reason to stay free. I will not be caught again. There is a reason." "What is it, Butcher?" "Because I am," he said softly, "and you are.

After all, they were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice.

Most people here have spent most of their time someplace else. You learn

Will sex between humans ever lose its endlessly repeated history?

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.

I wanted to get out, Vyme, to keep going and not be trapped, to be free.... only I was cruel. I had the chance to do it, and I took it. Why is that bad, Vyme? Unless, of course, that's what being free means.