The Atheist in the Attic Quotes

“We all live our lives from the inside of our bodies out, not from the outside in. Which is why fiction has the texture that it does.”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“Truth is what’s important in the world. But is what’s important always the truth?”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“We are the ink in which are written other messages that we cannot even understand.”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“I’m eccentric, yes, but I’m not insane.”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“Some people’s information is other people’s misinformation and even disinformation. That is pretty much the contemporary condition.”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“I’m using “discourse” in an older sense: discourse as response, understanding, discourse as structure both conscious and unconscious: not dialogue, but what impels and structures dialogue: not the “discourse between …” but the “discourse of …”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“Who am I talking to other than myself here? Someone I hope who at least knows my languages.”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“Is a poet someone who only wants to describe things, while a philosopher is someone who wants to describe things so that they will reflect and even explain the differences and forces that relate them all and hold them all together?
Or sometimes tear them apart.”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“Well, thinking about what’s not supposed to require thinking, that is philosophy, no?”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“There is so much knowledge available today that there can be no such thing anymore as a classical education that we can expect more than a relatively few people to share.”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“The history of science fiction tends to be the history of its editors.”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“Plato’s discussants and querents are not polite as students and teachers are polite. They are polite the way only fantasy discussants can be civil inside a fantasy. Were they real, they’d be at each other’s throats before eight or nine pages were done.”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“To yell about freedom from desire with your cock in your fist, is that enough to start a revolution?”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“I recited in Hebrew, “‘Truth and peace form the foundation of the world …”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“But aren’t journals such as this basically occasions for candid assessments?
No. They’re not. They’re for telling oneself the fictions that are as honest as you can make them and still keep your life bearable.”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“Is that a good enough reason to think that China and India, Africa and the Americas, whether at pole or equator, are simply uncivilised because they are different?”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic