Samuel R. Delany Quotes

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

My trade and art is to live.

My name is more important than myself.

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

I think it's the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you're a person that matters.

No matter what age you are, or what your circumstances might be, you are special, and you still have something unique to offer. Your life, because of who you are, has meaning.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away.

To write is to give meaning to suffering.

You must have an opinion about yourself, some kind of meaning to yourself, a purpose, if you are really going to learn anything or develop into that which you desire to be.

It doesn't seem Shakespeare works if you turn him into a religion.

You must learn to honor and cherish and love your Self. You must first see your Self as worthy before you can see another as worthy. You must first know your Self to be holy before you can acknowledge holiness in another.

He comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. He saves us in our disasters, not from them. He emphatically does not promise to meet only the odd winner of the self-improvement lottery. He meets us all in our endless and inescapable losing.

Ultimately, suffering is always political with all kinds of justifications - there are those who justify Israel's occupation of land as being a fulfillment of what God had promised.

For me, spirit is the impulse towards life, the Eros in a person leaping forward, whereas soul refers to something possibly long.. suffering, where meanings are made, where there is a sense of this gathering of perceptions, that our death is not the most important thing, nor our life.

The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.

The greatest single cause of a poor self-image is the absence of unconditional love.

Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

And I realized that I’d tolerated him this long because of self-doubt.

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.

It's a fun thing to do, to put yourself in the service of something if you think you can add an interpretation. It's no different than any other storytelling.

Nothing in human life, least of all in religion, is ever right until it is beautiful.

I'm a fool to keep staying, when you've made hurting me such an art.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.