SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren

Babes, I am so bored here that I don’t think, since I’ve come, I’ve ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.

SAMUEL R. DELANY
Nova

Oh, for the rebirth of an educational system where understanding was an essential part of knowledge.

SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Jewels of Aptor

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.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

Shorter Views - Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary

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In a population that basically feels that Sex Is Bad—or at best a necessary evil—often sex will occur, whether within the bounds of marriage or outside it, only at those moments of extreme need, and then in a paroxysm of guilt, so that the sexual incident itself is likely to be infrequent, desperate, brutal, and brief—and satisfactory, if such a word can even be used for an act which, in their different ways, both "perpetrator" and "victim" probably come to dread—for only the most basal needs of the more aggressive partner.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

Shorter Views - Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary

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Often, however, certain of our discussions are straited by a fear that without the authoritative appeal to origins and definitions as emblems of some fancied critical mastery, our observations and insights will not be welcomed, will not be taken for the celebrational pleasure that they are. What can I say, other than that we need more confidence in the validity of our own enterprise?

SAMUEL R. DELANY

Dhalgren

___________________

Babes, I am so bored here that I don’t think, since I’ve come, I’ve ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence. 

SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Einstein Intersection

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“What are you doing here?” I asked her at last.

“Probably the same thing you are.”

“What’s that?”

She looked serious. “Why don’t you tell me?”

I went back to my knife. “Sharpening my machete.”

“I’m sharpening my mind,” she said. “There is something to be done that will require an edge on both.”

SAMUEL R. DELANY
Triton

____________________

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

SAMUEL R. DELANY

____________________

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Jewels of Aptor

____________________

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.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

____________________

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.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

____________________

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.

- - - - -
ei·do·lon (īˈdōlən/)
noun

1. an idealized person or thing.
2. a spectre or phantom.

SAMUEL R. DELANY
“The Rhetoric of Sex, The Discourse of Desire”
____________________

One would almost think that they [straight white males] felt empowered to take anything the society produced, no matter how marginal, and utilize it for their own ends — dare we say “exploit it”? — certainly to take advantage of it as long as it’s around. And could this possibly be an effect of discourse? Perhaps it might even be one we on the margins might reasonably appropriate to our profit … or perhaps some of us already have. 

SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Einstein Intersection
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I must remember my own origins. Once I was as ignorant as you; I swear, though, I can’t remember when.

SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Mad Man

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Suppose I was researching, not the life of some genius philosopher with his books and articles and a wake of articulate friends and acquaintances, but rather, a homeless kid in and out of mental hospitals for chronic masturbation and indecent exposure? … How would I even start?

SAMUEL R. DELANY from The Jewels of Aptor

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.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

SAMUEL R. DELANY from Dhalgren

Babes, I am so bored here that I don’t think, since I’ve come, I’ve ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.