Nova Quotes

“You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.' Katin looked toward the front of the car.

The captain gazed through the curving plate that lapped the roof. His yellow eyes fixed Her consumptive light that pulsed fire-spots in a giant cinder. The light was so weak he did not squint at all.

I am confounded, Katin admitted to his jeweled box, 'nevertheless. The mirror of my observation turns and what first seemed gratuitous I see enough times to realize it is a habit. What I suspected as habit now seems part of a great design. While what I originally took as purpose explodes into gratuitousness. The mirror turns again, and the character I thought obsessed by purpose reveals his obsession is only habit; his habits are gratuitously meaningless; while those actions i construed as gratuitous now reveal a most demonic end.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“But the point is, when the writer turns to address the reader, he or she must not only speak to me—naively dazzled and wholly enchanted by the complexities of the trickery, and thus all but incapable of any criticism, so that, indeed, he can claim, if he likes, priestly contact with the greater powers that, hurled at him by the muse, travel the parsecs from the Universe’s furthest shoals, cleaving stars on the way, to shatter the specific moment and sizzle his brains in their pan, rattle his teeth in their sockets, make his muscles howl against his bones, and to galvanize his pen so the ink bubbles and blisters on the nib (nor would I hear her claim to such as other than a metaphor for the most profound truths of skill, craft, or mathematical and historical conjuration)—but she or he must also speak to my student, for whom it was an okay story, with just so much description.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“It’s only when all one knows of life is abstracted and used as an underlining statement of significant patterning that you have what is both beautiful and permanent.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“The inevitable is that unprepared for.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“If the situation of a technological society was such that there could be no direct relation between a man's work and his modus vivendi, other than money, at least he must feel that he is directly changing things by his work, shaping things, making things that weren't there before, moving things from one place to another. He must exert energy in his work and see these changes occur with his own eyes. Otherwise he would feel his life was futile.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“Katin tried to look reservedly doubtful. The expression was too complicated and came out blank.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“I was born," the Mouse said. "I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“Down, everybody! Down on all fours! We’re going to show you our new step! Like this: just swing your up and—”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“The yellow eyes had fallen from the tired star. Lorq's face erupted about the scar at some antic from the Mouse that Katin had missed.

Rage, Katin pondered. Rage. Yes, he is laughing. But how is anyone supposed to distinguish between laughter and rage in that face?

But the others were laughing too.
Yet some way, somehow, we do.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“Mouse, the seventy-eight cards of the Tarot present symbols and mythological images that have recurred and reverberated through forty-five centuries of human history. Someone who understands these symbols can construct a dialogue about a given situation. There’s nothing superstitious about it.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“Colors sluiced the air with fugal patterns as a shape subsumed the breeze and fell, to form further on, a brighter emerald, a duller amethyst. Odors flushed the wind with vinegar, snow, ocean, ginger, poppies, rum. Autumn, ocean, ginger, ocean, autumn; ocean, ocean, the surge of ocean again, while light foamed in the dimming blue that underlit the Mouse’s face. Electric arpeggios of a neo-raga rilled.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“Right now I'm just a bright guy with a lot to say and nothing to say it about.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“Wind passed again; the iris shuddered about the diamond chip.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“A man might go to an office and run a computer that would correlate great masses of figures that came from sales reports on how well, let’s say, buttons—or something equally archaic—were selling over certain areas of the country. This man’s job was vital to the button industry: they had to have this information to decide how many buttons to make next year. But though this man held an essential job in the button industry, was hired, paid, or fired by the button industry, week in and week out he might not see a button. He was given a certain amount of money for running his computer; with that money his wife bought food and clothes for him and his family. But there was no direct connection between where he worked and how he ate and lived the rest of his time. He wasn’t paid with buttons. As farming, hunting, and fishing became occupations of a small­er and smaller per cent of the population, this separation between man’s work and the way he lived—what he ate, what he wore, where he slept—became greater and greater for more people. Ashton Clark pointed out how psychologi­cally damaging this was to humanity. The entire sense of self-control and self-responsibility that man acquired during the Neolithic Revolution when he first learned to plant grain and domesticate animals and live in one spot of his own choosing was seriously threatened. The threat had been com­ing since the Industrial Revolution and many people had pointed it out, before Ashton Clark. But Ashton Clark went one step further. If the situation of a technological society was such that there could be no direct relation between a man’s work and his modus vivendi, other than money, at least he must feel that he is directly changing things by his work, shaping things, making things that weren’t there before, moving things from one place to another. He must exert energy in his work and see these changes occur with his own eyes. Otherwise he would feel his life was futile.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“Novels were primarily about relationships. … Their popularity lay in that they belied the loneliness of the people who read them, people essentially hypnotized by the machinations of their own consciousness.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“Some of the newer academics question the institute’s preoccupation with the twentieth century. … Perhaps they resent that it has been the traditional concern of scholars for eight hundred years; they refuse to see the obvious. At the beginning of that amazing century, mankind was many societies living on one world; at its end, it was basically what we are now: an informatively unified society that lived on several worlds. Since then, the number of worlds has increased; our informative unity has changed its nature several times, suffered a few catastrophic eruptions, but essentially has remained. Until humanity becomes something much, much different, the time must be the focus of scholarly interest: that was the century we became.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“Small breasts rose beneath the laces of her vest, steady as breath.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“Triumph was laughable and terrible and his.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“How many notes have you made on this book?” The Mouse chanced a tentative light through the hangar.

“Not a tenth as many as I need. Even though it's doomed as an obsolete museum relique, it will be jewelled—” he swung back on the nets— “crafted—” the links roared; his voice rose— “a meticulous work; perfect!”

“I was born,” the Mouse said. “I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you.”

Katin looked at his big, weak fingers against the mail. After a while he said, “Mouse, sometimes you make me want to cry.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“We are special people, if only by power. But if I tried to keep that knowledge forward in my mind, I’d be paralyzed. Here I am, at this moment, in this situation, with all this to do. What I’ve learned, Ruby, is how I can play. Whatever I do—I, the person I am and have been made—I have to do it that way to win.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“But right now I want to answer his question.” He turned back to Lorq. “But to tell you—” he walked to the wall and gazed out across the city—“I have to tell you some history. And not what you learned at Causby.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova

“Basically, gentlemen, Ulyrion is something else.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Nova