A sentence has meaning in the sense that a train has a track, not that a train has a passenger. Samuel R. Delany More Quotes by Samuel R. Delany More Quotes From Samuel R. Delany Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed. Samuel R. Delany starseyeifs The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow. Samuel R. Delany tomorrowpast 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 beliefarguingbelieve The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering. Samuel R. Delany luxurylevelssuffering 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. Samuel R. Delany missingwantideas 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 any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them. Samuel R. Delany colorhurthome The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words. Samuel R. Delany momentsenergytrying Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman. Samuel R. Delany fascinatingbreathingwatches 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. Samuel R. Delany citieshousetravel I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on. Samuel R. Delany terrorinfinityeternity Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep. Samuel R. Delany pretendinghystericalauthority In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next. Samuel R. Delany mythnextopposites 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. Samuel R. Delany work-outhusbandhome The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking. Samuel R. Delany philosophywaythinking As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal. Samuel R. Delany renewalturnslanguage There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health. Samuel R. Delany barometermencountry Fiction -- at least for me -- requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity. Samuel R. Delany blocksundaymorning I still believe pattern fascinates on its own. And three-sevenths of a pattern, or even a smaller fragment, can fascinate still more--get us really hunkering down, trying to tease out the whole of the figure in the carpet. Samuel R. Delany threetryingbelieve 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. Samuel R. Delany teenagechildrenschool In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all. Samuel R. Delany huntingrealwriting
