are you dreaming, Frederick?

" 'What do you want to change in the world?' she continued her recitation, looking away. 'What do you want to preserve? What is the thing you're searching for? What are you running from?'

" 'Nothing,' he said. 'And nothing. And nothing. And...nothing, at least that I know.'

" 'You have no purpose?'

" 'I want to get to Bellona and--' He chuckled. 'Mine's the same as everybody else's; in real life, anyway: to get through the next second, consciousness intact.' "
--Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren


"But the real mind is invisible: you're less aware of it, while you think, than you are of your eye while you see...until something goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning, the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it."
--Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren


" 'I've never wanted to kill myself,' he said. 'Never in my life. Sometimes I thought I was going to--because I'd gotten some crazy compulsion, to jump off a building or throw myself under a train, just to see what dying was like. But I never thought that life wasn't worth living, or that there was any situation so bad where just sitting it out wouldn't fix it up--that's if I couldn't get up and go somewhere else. But not wanting to kill myself doesn't stop me thinking about death. Say, has this ever happened to you? You're walking along a street, or sitting in a room, or lying down on the leaves, or even talking to people, and suddenly the thought comes--and when it comes, it comes all through you like a stop-action film of a crystal forming or an opening bud: 'I am going to die.' Someday, somewhere, I will be dying, and five seconds after that, I will be dead. And when it comes it comes like--' he smashed cupped palms together in the air so sharply she jumped--'that! And you know it, know your own death, for a whole second, three seconds, maybe five or ten...before the thought goes and you only remember the words you were mumbling, like 'Someday I will die,' which isn't the thought at all, just its ashes.' "
--Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren


"But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in a rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experiences becomes just a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all."
--Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren


" 'You meet a new person, you go with him,' Kid mused, 'and suddenly you get a whole new city.' "
--Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren


"Swinging up into the cab of a truck, miles north of Florida, and the driver asking how long you've been hitching, and the sunlight fills his lime-splattered lap and your rank jeans and he lets the radio play pop music for a while, for a while country; then twists the dial; your forearm burns on the outer edge of the door, your hair snaps and your cheek freezes, and the motion is spindled on the rush of music. So you sit, just breathing, to hear and to move through the red and green country, with the sun in the tree-tops a stutter of bright explosions.

"The City suffers from the lack of it.

"But most of us /have/ come here by way of it."
--Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren