Samuel R. Delany

"It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will r…"

"The city is very different from the country, girl. It is a kind of shared consciousness that begins its work on you as soon as you enter it, if not well before, a consciousness that begins to separate…"

"Bayle turned to watch the drifting mists along the shore and thought: In three days we have eaten with this Captain four times, talked with him about navigation, his three families, his collection of …"

"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 phantasmag…"

"But almost as if presenting the image of some ironic answer, the wings flapped against a sudden, high, unfelt breeze, and the beast, here shorn of all fables, rose and rose—for a while—under the night…"

"“In this random, chaotic world, filled with apes and demigods and all in between, where mass murder and assassination is the past time of the hour, where any structure you cling to may topple in a mom…"

"Books! Real books were Joneny’s delight. Heavy, cumbersome, difficult to store, they were the bane of most scholars. Joneny found them entrancing. He didn’t care what was in them. Any book today was s…"

"At a certain point I came to the conclusion that one of the murderous aspects of the AIDS crisis was that people were used to not talking about sexual experiences in detail. Gay sex for instance does …"