Quotes by Samuel R. Wells

“The father-mother-son that makes up the basic family unit, at least as the Family has described it for centuries now, represents a power structure, a structure of strong powers, mediating powers, and subordinate powers, as well as paths for power developments and power restrictions.””

“I don’t know whether Asimov realized he was saying this as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever look at you, read a word you write, or consider you in any situation, no matter whether the roof is falling in or the money is pouring in, without saying to him- or herself (whether in an attempt to count it or to discount it), 'Negro...' The racial situation, permeable as it might sometimes seem (and it is, yes, highly permeable), is nevertheless your total surround. Don’t you ever forget it...! And I never have.””

“Well, your perfect erotic object remains only in recognition memory); and his absolute absence from reconstruction memory becomes the yearning that is, finally, desire. That socially surrounded absence, when you’re young, masks a lot of things in the real world; when you’re older and a few thousand sexual encounters have begun to clear what desire is about (or perhaps what really lies about desire) and you have begun to perceive desire’s edges, its effect is not so much that of an obliterator any more as it is that of a distorting lens. If you can smile at what you see through, it’s sometimes illuminating.””

“it is better to accept the inevitable with energy. Well then, if I have not chosen up till now, now I choose. That is freedom. Having chosen, I am free. Somewhere in my memory””

“Shiftrunes?” “Letters that are pronounced one way on their first occurrence in a text, another on their second, another on their third, and so on in a fixed sequence. It gives the poet an interesting technique to exploit: she can have pairs of words that alliterate visually but not phonetically as well as pairs that alliterate phonetically but not visually. And she can play the two off against each other.””

“Well, thinking about what’s not supposed to require thinking, that is philosophy, no?””

“You know, the first mental hospitals in Europe were leprosaria, deserted all over the continent at the end of the middle ages because”

“In a hundred years they may both be sciences. Fine. But today a person who learns the rules of art well is a little rarer than the person who learns the rules of science. Also,””

“Well, man, there ain't nothing I like to eat out better than pecker-poked pig-pussy!””

“Sometimes I cannot tell who wrote what. That is upsetting. With some sections, I can remember the place and time I wrote them, but have no memory of the incidents described. Similarly, other sections refer to things I recall happening to me, but kne/o/w just as well I never wrote out. Then there are pages that, today, I interpret one way with the clear recollection of having interpreted them another at the last rereading.””

“There is nothing safe about the darkness of this city and its stink. Well, I have abrogated all claim to safety, coming here. It is better to discuss it as though I had chosen. That keeps the scrim of sanity before the awful set. What will lift it?””

“The general point: the story process keeps the vision clear and the action moving. But if we do not notate the vision accurately, if we accept some phrase we should have discarded, if we allow to stand some sentence that is not as sharp as we can make it, then the vision is not changed in the same way it would have been otherwise: the new sections of the vision will not light up quite so clearly, perhaps not at all. As well, the movement of the vision”

“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”