Skip to content

Quotes from Flight from Nevèrÿon — Samuel R. Delany

born 1942 United States

← All quotes by Samuel R. Delany

23 quotes

To be morally upset about how other people take their sexual pleasure is surely the weirdest human quirk ever.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

Origins are always constructs, always contouring ideological agendas.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

What makes a boy interesting does not make a man interesting.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

The audience’s performance is always more or less stochastic.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

The artist’s performance is always more or less aleatory.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

Men and women are less than a chromosome apart.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

We moved toward that precipice with a motion as inexorable as that with which time takes us toward our death.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

You understand, Pryn, I don’t believe in any of it: magic, miracles, religion, the calling of the gods, named or unnamed.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

Could it be, he wondered, he’d only thought he’d seen what he’d seen because of his own desires, researches, expectations?

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

I felt, and still feel, that it is important for fantasy to have a grasp of the complexity of fact, if not of factual content.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

Appearances are signs of possibilities, at least when one remembers that what appears may be a sign by masking as easily as by manifesting.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

It is the rare society that does not abuse its artists.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

But whatever you say of them, finally I had to dismiss such notions as the ratiocinations desire can entangle about the most sensible of us.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

I’m a public man, my princess. That means my only meaning is the web of signs I publicly inhabit.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

In a sense, modern philosophy is a series of introductions to introductions to introductions, the movement between them controlled by the pro-tective/pro-textive play of forces about desire.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

But that kind has not a true word in him. I wouldn’t be surprised if everything he said were a lie. Such as he lies as he breathes. Truth is something he’s never even learned to speak.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

I believe art is a wholly formal enterprise, encompassing almost all the tenets that the nineteenth century spoke of as l’art pour l’art, tenets which have made twentieth century’s experimentation possible. (What postmodern doesn’t?)

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

Yes, I learned about monsters on that trip. And I learned about them in these encounters afterward:
First, monsters are real.
Second, they are us.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

Life, I sometimes think—like dreams, like stories, like plans, even like lies if you will—is to be pondered on, interpreted, interrogated: but you had best not try to change it too radically in the middle, or you risk never finding its secret.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

Life is hard for everyone, and we must not take credit ourselves for the little that others can do with theirs. Rather look instead to whom we can give credit, if not thanks, for what little we have been able to do with our own.

Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Samuel R. Delany (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.