Samuel R. Delany Quotes

The little serpent has left, and the great serpent has come.

We live in our myths, we only endure reality.

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.

Myth is the nothing that is all.

Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites?

If there is one ‘constant’ in the structure and theme of the wonder tale, it is transformation.

The wrong question to ask of a myth is whether it is true or false. The right question is whether it is living or dead, whether it still speaks to our condition.

What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.

In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious

For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.

Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a

What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.

Beauty loved him more than anything, her Beast boy, but, secretly, sometimes, she wished he would have remained a Beast.

There's a lot of symbolism to your return. Is that going to be enough to reinvigorate the company with a sense of magic?

To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.

History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.

The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth. But what we feel most deeply can’t be spoken in words alone. At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth.

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.

Contrary to popular myth, werewolves myth, werewolves are born, not made. No matter how many times they bite someone, that person will not turn, though they will probably bleed profusely and will definitely be annoyed.

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word "crisis." One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you.

If you were to send a werewolf to the moon, would he be a werewolf permanently?