{"author":"Samuel R. Delany","author_id":"Samuel+R.+Delany","total_quotes":36,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Samuel R. Delany","tags":["art","hip","taste"],"id":2167,"author_id":"Samuel+R.+Delany"},{"text":"Do you follow the wrestling? Most people think it's illegal, but you can watch it there. Ruby and Python are on display this evening.","author":"Samuel R. Delany","tags":["context","humorous","prophecies"],"id":9377,"author_id":"Samuel+R.+Delany"},{"text":"Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.","author":"Samuel R. Delany","tags":["babel-17","samuel-r-delany","word","words"],"id":12792,"author_id":"Samuel+R.+Delany"},{"text":"All life is a rhythm,” she said as I sat up. “All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before liferesumes.","author":"Samuel R. Delany","tags":["inspirational","music","science"],"id":20269,"author_id":"Samuel+R.+Delany"},{"text":"Those moments when we learn that mothers rage and fathers kill, that friends betray and authority is fallible, or that our own blank, innocent ignorance can destroy the pure, the good, and the loved are moments the very memory of which constitutes the beginning of a strategy to live in a world where such horrors exist.","author":"Samuel R. Delany","tags":["ity","betrayal","fallible","fathers","friends","horrors","ignorance","memory","moments","mothers","strategy"],"id":23804,"author_id":"Samuel+R.+Delany"},{"text":"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.","author":"Samuel R. Delany","tags":["desire"],"id":49877,"author_id":"Samuel+R.+Delany"},{"text":"The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.","author":"Samuel R. Delany","tags":["civilization","reason"],"id":63397,"author_id":"Samuel+R.+Delany"},{"text":"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.","author":"Samuel R. Delany","tags":["desire"],"id":73208,"author_id":"Samuel+R.+Delany"},{"text":"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.","author":"Samuel R. Delany","tags":["art","experience","science-fiction"],"id":103503,"author_id":"Samuel+R.+Delany"},{"text":"Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.","author":"Samuel R. Delany","tags":["books","endings","stories"],"id":144480,"author_id":"Samuel+R.+Delany"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":36,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}