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The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

Book by Samuel R. Delany · 4 quotes · Memory, Afrofuturism, Authority

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The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Quotes

“Those moments when we learn that mothers rage and fathers kill, that friends betray and authority is fallible, or that our own blank, innocent ignorance can destroy the pure, the good, and the loved are moments the very memory of which constitutes the beginning of a strategy to live in a world where such horrors exist.”

MomentsIgnoranceFriendsAuthorityStrategyMemoryBetrayalMothersFathersHorrorsFallible
Book:The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village
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“And for a moment (and only a moment), it was as if a gap between two absolute and unquestionably separated columns or encampments of the world had suddenly revealed itself as illusory; that what I had assumed two was really one; and that the glacial solidity of the boundary I’d been sure existed between them was as permeable as shimmering water, as shifting light.”

UtopiaQueernessQueer TheoryAfrofuturism
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“...I looked out the window at walls of moonlit cloud rising beside us as though we we were at the bottom of some, gray and ivory canyon, hung above the moon-smashed sea... But, with whatever hindsight, I suppose the reason that I want to close on a consideration of these words is that the moon-solid progress through high, drifting cumulus is — read them again — at the very opposite of what we perceive on a liquid's tilting and untilting top, and so becomes the other privileged pole among the images of this study, this essay, this memoir. Or perhaps, as it is only a clause whose syntactic place has been questioned by my own unscholarly researches, I merely want to fix it before it vanishes like water, like light, like the play between them we only suggest, but never master, with the word motion.”

LightMoonMemoryMotion
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“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.”

FeelingsSocialSexAwarenessEmotionalCommunicationPhysicalOrgySexual Encounters
Book:The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village
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