Dialogism Quotes

“You claimed that... I would embroil those same carefully and colorfully constructed barrow-pushers and counts and wagoners and cutpurses in perfectly preposterous actions, during the course of which each would declare with great eloquence things that no count or cutpurse would ever possibly say. And if any ever even thought that he or she felt such things, you maintained, it was only from having been taken in by our skits in the first place.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Flight from Nevèrÿon

“The voices I give, however decorated with observations and interpretations of the other, are, nevertheless and certainly, very much my own.

But they do not speak for the other--and therefore speak falsely.

They speak rather to the other: the other in me, the other in you, the other in my other friend--assuming he would not finally and for the first time turn at this particular outrage to the real we call "his story" and laugh with undisguised derision at my preposterous fancy with no relation at all to his life, his madness, his city--instead of giving out with his usual applause. They speak against the other. They speak always in dialogue with, in contrast to, in protest of the real. They are always calling out to the other across the bridge on whose wild span madness and desire endlessly trade places, creating a wilderness at their center as palpably dangerous as that observed at any ill-mapped border. The monologue of art must be reinterpreted as the many-voiced argument of the artist with life, with life's images--indeed, as the wrangle between the articulate and everything else, with desire never fully possessed by any party, but endlessly at play between.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Flight from Nevèrÿon