Top Samuel R. Delany Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Samuel R. Delany Biography

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Ray Delany Jr. (/dəˈleɪni/; born April 1, 1942), Chip Delany to his friends, is an African American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes fiction (especially science fiction), memoir, criticism and essays on sexuality and society.

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Samuel R. Delany Quotes

It's only. . . when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.

Purpose, Who We Are, Knows, Know, Stripped

Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.

Ambition, Liquid, Rubies, Ruby, Stains

The truth is always multiplex.

Multiplex, Truth, Truth Is

Dictators during the entire history of this planet have used similar techniques. By not letting the people of their country know what conditions existed outside their boundaries, they could get the people to fight to stay in those conditions. It was the old adage: Convince a slave that he's free , and he will fight to maintain his slavery.

Country, Fighting, Free, History, People, Stay

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind - -vividly, forcefully.

Energetic, Errors, Forcefully, Mind, Writing

Do you know how hard it is to make a home?. . . That's something that a woman does from inside herself. You do it in the face of all sorts of opposition. Husbands are very appreciative when it works out well. But they're not that anxious to help. It's understandable. They don't know how.

Help, Home, Husband, Sorts, Understandable, Work Out

Historically, I guess that's how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human.

Comfortable, Fiction, Littles, Notion, Think, Thinking

Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.

Exercise, Important, Science, Thinking, World

Suggestion is a literary strategy.

Literary, Strategy, Suggestion, Suggestions

You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city. . . you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.

Cities, House, Meet, Pass, Places, Travel

If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.

Grace, Powerful, Servant, Stay, Unobtrusively

The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.

Generates, Philosophy, Set, Specific, Thinking, Way

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

Hands, Humanity, Problem, Love, Members

Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.

Beginning, Exist, Explain, Ideas, Missing, Want

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.

Beautiful, Cities, City, Flame, Hunting, Indicates

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

Myth, Next, Opposites, Supersedes, Things, Version

'You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land, while we. . . ' She turned her head right, left, and her black hair curled and uncurled on the shoulder of her coat. 'We have our dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshiping you!'

Circled, Hair, Land, Sky, Uncurled, World

I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.

Lazy, People, Thinking, Though, Writer

I suppose the problem. . . is that we have an inside and an outside. We've got problems both places, but it's so hard to tell where the one stops and the other takes up.

Hard, Places, Problem, Takes, Tell

Many of the early greats of sf Hugo Gernsback (publisher of Amazing Stories) in particular saw themselves as educators. The didactic thrust of science fiction got the genre initially pegged as children's fare. It was seen, at its best, as an extension of school and, at its worst, as teenage wish fulfillment.

Children, Fare, Initially, School, Teenage, Worst

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