Quotes from Samuel R. Delany

This God-damn city. If you wanna stay drunk, it sure is the place to come. You can buy drinks at the God-damn bars and you don't have to pay no money. Or anything. And anyplace you go, people always got stuff to smoke or to drink. Jesus." He burped. "I gotta go water the garden. Be back in a minute." He stepped away and headed for the john.

Why? Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought, Mocky. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language. The form of this language is … amazing." "What amazes you?" "Mocky, when you learn another tongue, you learn the way another people see the world, the universe." He nodded. "And as I see into this language, I begin to see … too much." "It sounds very poetical.

History is cyclic, not repetitive.

Here one page, possibly two, is missing.

But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it.

Your problem, you see, is that essentially you are a logical pervert, looking for a woman with a mutually compatible logical perversion.

You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry.

What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred; a false picture, again, because they show neither the general spread of our life's fabric, nor the most significant pattern points.

You claimed that... I would embroil those same carefully and colorfully constructed barrow-pushers and counts and wagoners and cutpurses in perfectly preposterous actions, during the course of which each would declare with great eloquence things that no count or cutpurse would ever possibly say. And if any ever even thought that he or she felt such things, you maintained, it was only from having been taken in by our skits in the first place.

Novels were primarily about relationships. … Their popularity lay in that they belied the loneliness of the people who read them, people essentially hypnotized by the machinations of their own consciousness.

an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented.

You scorpions do more to keep law and order in the city than anyone else. Only the good and the pure in heart dare go out on the street after dark.

What started it? The riot I mean." Joaquim bent his head far to the side. "Now you know, nobody has the story really straight. Something fell.

Thinking in Babel-17 was like suddenly seeing the water at the bottom of a well that a moment ago you thought had only gone down a few feet

Very. It was supposed to be a white kid on the roof and a nigger that got shot. So they started a riot.

Is that a good enough reason to think that China and India, Africa and the Americas, whether at pole or equator, are simply uncivilised because they are different?

But aren't journals such as this basically occasions for candid assessments? No. They're not. They're for telling oneself the fictions that are as honest as you can make them and still keep your life bearable.

MORE MICA THAN SAND.

I'd managed to type more than two hundred consecutive pages about more or less the same characters who stayed more or less in the same place and more or less took part in the same story.

The roster of Nobel laureates... is cluttered with mediocre writers who have neither elegance nor depth, readability nor relevance: lauded during their lifetimes, they died, I'm sure, convinced the had substantially advanced their languages. Your Miss Dickinson died equally convinced no one would ever read a word she wrote; and she is one of the most luminous poets your country has produced. An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit.

Long as you're healthy, Bellona is great. But there's no doctors or nothing, you know?

Tell me this. Are you all that happy? Be honest now." ..."I think... there's something wrong with your question, you know? I spend a lot of time happy; Inspend a lot of time unhappy; I spend a lot of time just bored. Maybe if I worked real hard at it, I could avoid some of the happiness, but I doubt it. The other two I know I'm stuck with...

All life is a rhythm," she said as I sat up. "All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes." She picked up my machete. "Play something." She held the handle out. "Make music.

Tell me this. Are you all that happy? Be honest now." ..."I think... there's something wrong with your question, you know? I spend a lot of time happy; I spend a lot of time unhappy; I spend a lot of time just bored. Maybe if I worked real hard at it, I could avoid some of the happiness, but I doubt it. The other two I know I'm stuck with...