187 Quotes by Samuel R. Delany

I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn’t black.

I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.

What you are will make you what you will become.

Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep.

Apocalypse has come and gone. We’re just grubbing in the ashes.

Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.

All the misunderstandings that tie the world up and keep people apart were quivering before me at once, waiting for me to untangle them, explain them, and I couldn’t. I didn’t know the words, the grammar, the syntax.

The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectators experience should be identical to, or have anything to do with, the artist’s. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.

Linguistics is very much a science. It’s a human science, one of the human sciences. And it’s one of the more interesting human sciences.