Samuel R. Delany Quotes

I slipped through every school I went to without leaving a trace. I was in no team; I was never a prefect. I was totally mediocre - well, I probably still am - but at places like Summer Fields and Eton, it's all about sport and doing your bit, and I always preferred to watch telly or read a book than run round a field.

There are two kinds of people in the world: Johnny Von Neumann and the rest of us.

People who think honestly and deeply have a hostile attitude towards the public.

If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.

Our "society" is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she's exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids. Isolation, further, enables him to try to maintain his pretense of being an individual by being a "rugged individualist", a loner, equating non-co-operation and solitariness with individuality.

I am not in the roll of common men.

Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman who prefer loneliness to the bickerings and constraints of heterosexual marriage, even such a woman who is a freak in our society needs a home... The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don't fit in.

I'm so boring that press kind of leave me alone now. People will believe what they want to believe anyway.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

I really only have Perfect Fun with myself. Other people won't stop and look at the things I want to look at or, if they do, they stop to please me or to humor me or to keep the peace.

"Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.

I never had that many friends growing up so I learned to be okay with just me.

Fictions are necessary for the people, and the Truth becomes deadly to those who are not strong enough to contemplate it in all its brilliance. In fact, what can there be in common between the vile multitude and sublime wisdom? The Truth must be kept secret, and the masses need a teaching proportioned to their imperfect reason.

All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.

When you don’t have many friends and you don’t have a social life you’re kind of left looking at things, not doing things. There’s a weird freedom in not having people treat you like you’re part of society or where you have to fulfill social relationships.

The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow,-one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness.

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.

I am alone with the masses.

Be good and you'll be lonesome

We are all really alone. We're isolated in our own mind.

If there were only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane?

Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous.

No man is an island, but some of us are long peninsulas.

Alone is a fact, a condition where no one else is around. Lonely is how you feel about that.