Quotes from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“You've blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It's as though I cannot even remember what I once desired. All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself-- and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified-- at least that's what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart. In a single gesture you've turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you've shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don't have it.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“We're plotting to steal time itself from you.... We're going to spike it to the floor as it slips by. And just as you come over to see why it's so still, we'll pull it out from under you--and send you spinning off around the galaxy's edge. We're planning to pluck all the best stars out of the sky and stuff them in our pockets... so that when we meet you once again and thrust our hands deep inside to hide our embarrassment, our fingertips will smart on them, as if they were desert grains, caught down in the seams, and we'll smile at you on your way to a glory that, for all our stellar thefts, we shall never be able to duplicate.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“stupidity: a process, not a state. A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. “Stupidity” is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information she or he puts out, commits him or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out. (Not to be confused with ignorance, or lack of data.) Since such a situation is impossible to achieve because of the nature of mind/perception itself in its relation to the functioning body, a continuing downward spiral of functionality and/or informative dissemination results,’ and he understood why! ‘The process, however, can be reversed,’ the voice continued, ‘at any time.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, ‘she’ is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of ‘woman’. The ancient, dimorphic form ‘he’, once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of ‘she’, during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“And his left nipple was centimetres above my right eye. I wanted to lean my head back and lick it – not from desire but from that idiocy always there to subvert desire and render it ludicrous. Our human heat was a third creature bevelling between us.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“What does it … feel like, to have lost an entire world?’

‘Lonely.’ Rat raised his many-ringed hand to rub at his neck under his broad jaw. ‘But the loneliness comes from the question.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“The father-mother-son that makes up the basic family unit, at least as the Family has described it for centuries now, represents a power structure, a structure of strong powers, mediating powers, and subordinate powers, as well as paths for power developments and power restrictions.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“It's a beautiful universe... wondrous and the more exciting because no one has written plays and poems and built sculptures to indicate the structure of desire I negotiate every day as I move about in it.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“Bitch, on that world, was what men called women they were extremely fond of or extremely displeased with when the woman was not there.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“Desire isn’t appeased by its object, only irritated into something more than desire that can join with the stars to inform the chaotic heavens with sense.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“You give me so much pleasure, why should I ever want to hurt you?”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“That surface bore the swirls and lines – fainter of course, and interrupted, and scarred – that, below, would let his finger print. I moved my hand, feeling the textures, copper, stone, nail, skin; and thought about the mechanics through which we locate beauty. By art, we can only do it through a disinterested precision which represses, while it mimes, all the interest that impels it. And we can only hope the difference between the repressed and the represented will read as intensity.

His hand was beautiful.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“Well, your perfect erotic object remains only in recognition memory); and his absolute absence from reconstruction memory becomes the yearning that is, finally, desire. That socially surrounded absence, when you’re young, masks a lot of things in the real world; when you’re older and a few thousand sexual encounters have begun to clear what desire is about (or perhaps what really lies about desire) and you have begun to perceive desire’s edges, its effect is not so much that of an obliterator any more as it is that of a distorting lens. If you can smile at what you see through, it’s sometimes illuminating.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“The Family/Sygn conflict is in the process of creating a schism throughout the entire galaxy, concerning just what exactly a woman is. And it may mean that instead of one universe with six thousand worlds in it, we will have a universe with one group of some thousands of worlds and another group of some thousands of others, and no connection between the two save memories of murder, starvation, and violence. And in a situation like that, no, you do not just simply decide to up and change sides!”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“truth provides the most diplomatic answer): “I don’t believe I’ve ever attended one since I was your age where I didn’t feel, beforehand, an oppressive dread at the isolation that can reign in a large enough group of even the most intimate friends, much less an admixture of intimates, acquaintances, and strangers. Still, so much of my social education has been effected in such gatherings, so many true friendships have had their beginnings in meetings much like yours and mine, that I feel these affairs must not only be endured, but negotiated with a certain energy, if not commitment.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“How true,' returned the measured, featureless voice. 'I would chuckle in amused agreement, but the laughter switches of my translator have been malfunctioning for the past six hours. You understand.'

'Certainly,' I said. And somehow felt much more comfortable.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“...in a universe where both information and misinformation are constantly suspect, reviewed and drifing as they must be (constantly) by and between the two, a moment when either information or misinformation turns out to be harmless must bloom, when surrounded by the workings of desire and terror, into the offered sign of all about it, making and marking all about it innocent by contamination.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“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. […]”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“I can’t …” Then, beside Mother Dyeth’s silent personality column,”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“Will sex between humans ever lose its endlessly repeated history?”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“Shiftrunes?” “Letters that are pronounced one way on their first occurrence in a text, another on their second, another on their third, and so on in a fixed sequence. It gives the poet an interesting technique to exploit: she can have pairs of words that alliterate visually but not phonetically as well as pairs that alliterate phonetically but not visually. And she can play the two off against each other.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

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