Quote

Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen.

Samuel R. Delany

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Samuel R. Delany
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: April 1
Author
Cartoonist
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Samuel Ray Delany
Jr.
Samuel Ray Delany
Chip Delany
Samuel Ray Chip Delany
Jr.
K. Leslie Steiner
S. L. Kermit
May
Happen
Moons
Use
Anticipation
Running
Clouds
Left
Miracle
Order
Moon
Happens
City
Two
Cities
Anything
Control

More quotes by Samuel R. Delany

Image
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
Image
Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
'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!'
Samuel R. Delany
Image
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
Image
I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
The reason for privacy is not so that people will not know you go to the bathroom. It's to allow certain things to go on that you don't want other people to know about, when all is said and done. But the things I don't want other people to know about are not my sex life.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
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
Image
I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is - which I'm a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
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.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
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.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
A sentence has meaning in the sense that a train has a track, not that a train has a passenger.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
Samuel R. Delany
Image
Reality must prove itself again and again to questioners ... it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself.
Samuel R. Delany