Skip to content

It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfections on to another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies.

— Samuel R. Delany The Einstein Intersection (1967)

Another quote →

Topics

Imagination

More quotes by Samuel R. Delany

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

Nova (1968)

“As time progresses,” Lump stated, “people learn. That’s the only hope.”

Empire Star (1966)

Bear in mind that the novel—no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective—is always a historical projection of its own time.

Nova (1968)

What real power can buy, of course, is anonymity.

Neveryóna (1983)

And who’s to say where life ceases and theater begins—

Triton (1976)

All Samuel R. Delany quotes →

You may also like

Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me.

L. Frank Baum Introduction to The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)

There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.

Alan Moore

An active imagination may find a bad tendency arising out of every transaction between imperfect morals.

Edward Hall Alderson Brownlow v. Egerton (1854)

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Samuel R. Delany (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.