“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, quote from Dhalgren
“The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote 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.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“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.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“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, quote from Dhalgren
“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, quote from Dhalgren
“You begin to suspect, as you gaze through this you-shaped hole of insight and fire, that though it is the most important thing you own — never deny that for an instant — it has not shielded you from anything terribly important. The only consolation is that though one could have thrown it away at any time, morning or night, one didn't. One chose to endure. Without any assurance of immortality, or even competence, one only knows one has not been cheated out of the consolation of carpenters, accountants, doctors, ditch-diggers, the ordinary people who must do useful things to be happy. Meander along, then, half blind and a little mad, wondering when you actually learned — was it before you began? — the terrifying fact that had you thrown it away, your wound would have been no more likely to heal: indeed, in an affluent society such as this, you might even have gone on making songs, poems, pictures, and getting paid. The only difference would have been — and you learned it listening to all those brutally unhappy people who did throw away theirs — and they do, after all, comprise the vast and terrifying majority — that without it, there plainly and starkly would have been nothing there; no, nothing at all.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“they were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“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.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there's so much of it, blaring in through the five senses.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“If people are busy living out myths you don’t like, leave them to it.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“Things have made you what you are," she recited "What you are will make you what you will become.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“There is nothing left to watch but fire and the night: circle within circle, light within light. Messages arrive in the net where discrete pulses cross. Parametal engines of joy and disaster give them wave and motion. We interpret and defeat their terms by terminus. The night? What of it. It is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen,
constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“He wanted to talk and had nothing to say.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“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, quote from Dhalgren
“And what have I invested in interpreting disfocus for chaos? This threat: the only lesson is to wait. I crouch in the smoggy terminus. The streets lose edges, the rims of thought flake. What have I set myself to fix in this dirty notebook that is not mine? Does the revelation that, though it cannot be done with words, it might be accomplished in some lingual gap, give me the right, in injury, walking with a woman and her dog in pain? Rather the long doubts: that this labor tears up the mind's moorings; that, though life may be important in the scheme, awareness is an imperfect tool with which to face it. To reflect is to fight away the sheets of silver, the carbonated distractions, the feeling that, somehow, a thumb is pressed on the right eye. This exhaustion melts what binds, releases what flows.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“Presumptuous bastard,' Tak said. 'Sunset? He might at least wait and see if there's a tomorrow morning.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“He laughed. “So you see, I’m not a nut. Not a real one, anyway. I haven’t been a real nut in a long time.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“I heard Bellona was where it was at. It must be, now. I’m here.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The indark answered with wind.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“He shrugged. Confusion was like struggling to find the proper way to sit inside his skin.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“No laws: to break, or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become-" [...] "exactly who you are.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“Lots of people do things lots better than lots of others; but, today, so many people do so many things very well, and so many people are seriously interested in so many different things people do for their own different reasons, you can’t call any thing the best for every person, or even every serious person. So you just pay real attention to the real things that affect you; and don’t waste your time knocking the rest.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen. I don’t need more intimations of disorder. It has to be more than that! Search the smoke for the fire’s base. Read from the coals neither success nor despair. This edge of boredom is as bright. I pass it, into the dark rim. There is the deceiving warmth that asks nothing. There are objects lost in double-light.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
“it is better to accept the inevitable with energy. Well then, if I have not chosen up till now, now I choose. That is freedom. Having chosen, I am free. Somewhere in my memory”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Dhalgren
Samuel R. Delany
Born place: in New York City, The United States
Born date April 1, 1942
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“arrays are covariant. This scary-sounding word means simply that if Sub is a subtype of Super, then the array type Sub[] is a subtype of the array type Super[]. Generics, by contrast, are invariant: for any two distinct types Type1 and Type2, List is neither a subtype nor a supertype of List. You might think this means that generics are deficient, but arguably it is arrays that are deficient.”
― quote from Effective Java Programming Language Guide
“After I put on my coat, I turn and whisper to Camille: “Just a minute.” In the living room, I leave a wide space between myself and the recliner where Cookie’s sitting, knowing that distance from her is the only thing that has kept me both physically and emotionally safe. Wearing a blue flannel shirt, black stretch pants, and a scowl, she slowly meets my eyes. The TV’s reflection flashes off the lenses of her huge, shaded eyeglasses. “Good-bye,” I tell her. It comes out cold and flat. When she responds with silence, I nod. This is all I’ll get. Cherie opens the front door, and Camille and I exit with her. When the three of us get to the train station, we all break down in tears. It’s a cry of anger for our mother’s failure to take responsibility, for the unfairness of having had no say in choosing who brought us into this world . . . and for our relief knowing that soon she’ll be gone, for good.”
― Regina Calcaterra, quote from Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island
“Cause you know, we live in different time, me in your yesterday, you in my tomorrow.”
― quote from Anterograde Tomorrow
“His head lowers so he's looking in my eyes. "I'm completely in love with you.”
― Mila Ferrera, quote from Spiral
“In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them?”
― J.M. Coetzee, quote from Foe
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Lament for a SonBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
