187 Quotes by Samuel R. Delany

When I was packing those, I caught myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could – nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment compound I’d gotten permission to riffle had put up a whole shelf full of cubes of women writers or texts about women. She was convinced nobody could be truly educated unless they’d read them – though nobody I ever met had, except her, maybe. […]

You do not need an identity to become yourself; you need an identity to become -like- someone else.

But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense-stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety-is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself... in a way other people just can't.

While a name is always something you can choose, it only functions socially as long as I call you by it. (And try calling people names that they don't choose to be called by, if you want to see some real social unrest.)

Uma consciência multiplexa sempre faz perguntas quando precisa.

The clean, clear ending that society keeps looking for is impossible to find.

An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit.

To be sure, the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, even when it takes you through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Just watch out for parasites.

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.