Driftglass Quotes

“Driftglass," I said. "You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut-crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?"

I know the Coca-Cola bottles."

They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry, they're milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass

“There are certain directions in which you cannot go. Choose one in which you can move as far as you want.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass

“Loving someone... I mean really loving someone... means you are willing to admit the person you love is not what you first fell in love with, not the image you first had; and you must be able to like them still for being as close to that image as they are, and avoid disliking them for being so far away.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass

“as the nature of space and time are relative to the concentration of matter in a given area of the continuum, the nature of reality itself operates by the same or similar, laws. The averaged mass of all the stars in our galaxy controls the ‘reality’ of our microsector of the universe. But as a ship leaves the galactic rim, ‘reality’ breaks down and causes insanity and eventual death for any crew, even though certain mechanical laws – though not all – appear to remain, for reasons we don’t understand, relatively constant. Save for a few barbaric experiments done with”
― Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass

“as the nature of space and time are relative to the concentration of matter in a given area of the continuum, the nature of reality itself operates by the same or similar, laws. The averaged mass of all the stars in our galaxy controls the ‘reality’ of our microsector of the universe. But as a ship leaves the galactic rim, ‘reality’ breaks down and causes insanity and eventual death for any crew, even though certain mechanical laws – though not all – appear to remain, for reasons we don’t understand, relatively constant. Save for a few barbaric experiments done with psychedelics at the dawn of spatial travel, we have not even developed a vocabulary that can deal with ‘reality’ apart from its measurable, physical expression. Yet, just when we had to face the black limit of intergalactic space, bright resources glittered within.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass