ABSTRACT THOUGHTS in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, stative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, relative, instructive, abusive, adhesive, intensive, Essie, ablative, translation, cogitative. Sixteen cases of the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid If there's no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn't the proper form, you don't have how even if you have the words. Imagine, in Spanish having to assign a sex to every object: dog, table, tree, can-opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a sex to anything: he, she, it all the same word. Thou art my friend, but you are my king; thus the distinctions of Elizabeth the First's English. But with some oriental languages, which all but dispense with gender and number, you are my friend, you are my parent, and YOU are my priest, and YOU are my king, and YOU are my servant, and YOU are my servant whom I'm going to fire tomorrow if YOU don't watch it, and YOU are my king whose policies I totally disagree with and have sawdust in YOUR head instead of brains, YOUR highness, and YOU may be my friend, but I'm still going to smack YOU upside the head if YOU ever say that to me again;And who the hell are you anyway. . .?

— Samuel R. Delany

All life is a rhythm,” she said as I sat up. “All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes.

— Samuel R. Delany

An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit.

— Samuel R. Delany

And his left nipple was centimeters above my right eye. I wanted to lean my head back and lick it – not from desire but from that idiocy always there to subvert desire and render it ludicrous. Our human heat was a third creature beveling between us.

— Samuel R. Delany

An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented. I am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. Furthermore, I am someone in that room; I am—

— Samuel R. Delany

Because feelings, emotional and physical, are so foregrounded in sexual encounters, the orgy is soon the most social of human interchanges, where awareness and communication, whether verbal or no, hold all together or sunder it.

— Samuel R. Delany

But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense-stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety-is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself... in a way other people just can't.

— Samuel R. Delany

Desire isn’t appeased by its object, only irritated into something more than desire that can join with the stars to inform the chaotic heavens with sense.

— Samuel R. Delany

Do you follow the wrestling? Most people think it's illegal, but you can watch it there. Ruby and Python are on display this evening.

— Samuel R. Delany

Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

— Samuel R. Delany