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Now For Me, You're The Irreplaceable One: I've Never See You Up So Close Before, And I Do Not Understand You At All. You Say Sometimes I Act Like I Don't See You? I Don't Even Know Where To Look! Living With You Around Is Like Is Like Living With A Permanent Dazzle. The Fact That You Even Like Me, Or Look At Me, Or Brush By Me, Or Hug Me, Or Hold Me, Is So Surprising That After It's Over I Have To Go Back Through It A Dozen Times In My Head To Savor It And Try And Figure Out What It Was Like Because I Was Too Busy Being Astounded While It Was Happening.

-Samuel R. Delany

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Now For Me, You're

Samuel R. Delany

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Now For Me, You're The Irreplaceable One: I've Never See You Up So Close Before, And I Do Not Understand You At All. You Say Sometimes I Act Like I Don't See You? I Don't Even Know Where To Look! Living With You Around Is Like Is Like Living With A Permanent Dazzle. The Fact That You Even Like Me, Or Look At Me, Or Brush By Me, Or Hug Me, Or Hold Me, Is So Surprising That After It's Over I Have To Go Back Through It A Dozen Times In My Head To Savor It And Try And Figure Out What It Was Like Because I Was Too Busy Being Astounded While It Was Happening.

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Babes, I Am So Bored Here That I Don't Think, Since I've Come, I've Ever Been More Than Three Minutes Away From Some Really Astonishing Act Of Violence.

Linguistics Is Very Much A Science. It's A Human Science, One Of The Human Sciences. And It's One Of The More Interesting Human Sciences.

The Emblem Of A Philosophy Is Not That It Contains A Set Of Specific Thoughts , But That It Generates A Way Of Thinking.

I Think Of Myself As A Very Lazy Writer, Though Other People See It Differently.

Spending Practically Every Minute Of Your Day On Pure Survival Is An Absolutely Boring Life.

Science Fiction Doesn’t Try To Predict The Future, But Rather Offers A Significant Distortion Of The Present…we Sit Around And Look At What We See Around Us And We Say How Can The World Be Different

I Think A 23-page Ordinary Comic Is An Investment For The Artist, But If You're Doing Something 60 To 104 Pages, That's A Really Big Investment For An Artist. So Unless You've Got Someone Who Wants To Pay You While You're Doing It Or Up Front, It's Kind Hard To Get Someone To Do That With You, Unless You're The Artist Yourself.

Everyone In A Position Of Authority Is Hysterical, And Everyone Else Is Pretending To Be Asleep.

Actions Are Interesting To Watch. I Learn About The Actors. Their Movements Are Emblems Of The Tensions In This Internal Landscape, Which Their Actions Resolve. About-to-act Is An Interesting State To Experience, Because I Am Conscious Of Just Those Tensions. Acting Itself Feels Fairly Dull; It Not Only Resolves, It Obliterates Those Tensions From My Consciousness. Acting Is Only Interesting As It Leads To New Tensions That, Irrelevantly, Cause Me To Act Again.

Do You Know How Hard It Is To Make A Home?... That's Something That A Woman Does From Inside Herself. You Do It In The Face Of All Sorts Of Opposition. Husbands Are Very Appreciative When It Works Out Well. But They're Not That Anxious To Help. It's Understandable. They Don't Know How.

I Was A Kid Who Liked Art And Theater And Dance And Music, But If You Lived In Harlem, High Culture Was Somewhere Else, And It Wasn't Black.

Honesty Is The Best Policy ; A Policy Is, After All, A Strategy For Living In The Polis In The City.

The Truth Is Always Multiplex.

Now For Me, You're The Irreplaceable One: I've Never See You Up So Close Before, And I Do Not Understand You At All. You Say Sometimes I Act Like I Don't See You? I Don't Even Know Where To Look! Living With You Around Is Like Is Like Living With A Permanent Dazzle. The Fact That You Even Like Me, Or Look At Me, Or Brush By Me, Or Hug Me, Or Hold Me, Is So Surprising That After It's Over I Have To Go Back Through It A Dozen Times In My Head To Savor It And Try And Figure Out What It Was Like Because I Was Too Busy Being Astounded While It Was Happening.

A Sentence Has Meaning In The Sense That A Train Has A Track, Not That A Train Has A Passenger.

Pain ... After You've Lived With It Long Enough, Isn't Pain Anymore. It's Something Else.

The Artist Has Some Internal Experience That Produces A Poem, A Painting, A Piece Of Music. Spectators Submit Themselves To The Work, Which Generates An Inner Experience For Them. But Historically 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. That Idea Comes From An Over-industrialized Society Which Has Learned To Distrust Magic.

Ambition Like A Liquid Ruby Stains.

Endings To Be Useful Must Be Inconclusive.

From 1968 On, I Was Pretty Much The Black, Gay Sf Writer.

I Suppose The Problem ... Is That We Have An Inside And An Outside. We've Got Problems Both Places, But It's So Hard To Tell Where The One Stops And The Other Takes Up.

I Want To Read About A Character Doing Something Fairly Quiet Where I Can Picture Who The Character Is, And What Their Attitude Towards The World Is - Which I'm A Lot More Interested In Than What They Do Under The Pressure Of A Gunfight.

A Poet Is Wounded Into Speech, And He Examines These Wounds, Meticulously, To Discover How To Heal Them. The Bad Poet Harangues At The Pain And Yowls At The Weapons That Lacerate Him; The Great Poet Explores The Inflamed Lips Of Ruined Flesh With Ice-caked Fingers, Glittering And Precise; But Ultimately His Poem Is The Echoing, Dual Voice Reporting The Damages.

I Still Believe Pattern Fascinates On Its Own. And Three-sevenths Of A Pattern, Or Even A Smaller Fragment, Can Fascinate Still More--get Us Really Hunkering Down, Trying To Tease Out The Whole Of The Figure In The Carpet.

The Idea That Certain Things In Life - And In The Universe - Don't Yield Up Their Secrets Is Something That Requires A Slightly More Mature Reader To Accept.

The Pulp Hero, Though He May Be A Renegade, Is A Guy Who Doesn't Feel. Anything. Ever. And For The Adolescent Male - Pummeled By Emotions Left And Right, Whether Arising From Sexuality Or Resulting From His Necessary Encounters With Authority - This Hero Is A Blessing, A Relief And A Release. The World He Lives In, Where Feelings Are Totally Under Control, Looks To The Adolescent Boy Like Heaven! This Hero's Lack Of Feeling - Like Star Trek's Spock - Is What Allows Him To Be A Genius, Or Allows Him To Shoot The Bad Guys And/or Aliens, Without A Quiver To His Lip.

Discourse Says, 'you Are.' Rhetoric Preserves The Freedom To Say, 'i Am Not.

I Took My Writing Seriously, And It Seemed To Pay Off.

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As A Prose Writer, I Work With Language; And Those Who Work With Language Turn To Poetry For Renewal.

How We Treat Our Invalids - Our Mad, Our Physically Or Mentally Compromised Family Members - Does Tell You Something About Who We Are Politically, Historically, Culturally.

Clouds Out Of Control Decoct Anticipation. What Use Can Any Of Us Have For Two Moons? The Miracle Of Order Has Run Out And I Am Left In An Unmiraculous City Where Anything May Happen.

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Since I Spent Eighteen Years Of My Life As A Child, And Nine Years Of That Life As A Pretty Sexually Active Gay Child, My Complaint Against The Current Attitudes Is That They Work Mightily To Silence The Voices Of Children First And Secondarily Ignore What Adults Have To Say Who Have Been Through These Situations. One Size Fits All Is Never The Way To Handle Any Situation With A Human Dimension. Many, Many Children-and I Was One Of Them-are Desperate To Establish Some Sort Of Sexual Relation With An Older And Even Adult Figure.

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All Too Often, When Creative People Pick Out Someone Else's Creative Work As An Inspiration, What They End Up With Is Very, Very Far From The Original.

Dictators During The Entire History Of This Planet Have Used Similar Techniques. By Not Letting The People Of Their Country Know What Conditions Existed Outside Their Boundaries, They Could Get The People To Fight To Stay In Those Conditions. It Was The Old Adage: Convince A Slave That He's Free , And He Will Fight To Maintain His Slavery .

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