Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
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There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.
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I realize I don’t know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic.
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I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.
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When vision failsDirection is lost.When direction is lostPurpose may be forgotten. When purpose if forgottenEmotion rules alone.When emotion rules alone,Destruction...destruction.
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Freedom is dangerous, Cory, but it’s precious, too. You can’t just throw it away or let it slip away. You can’t sell it for bread and pottage.
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Kindness eases change.
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I'm trying to speak--to write-the truth. I"m trying to be clear. I'm not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.
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Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.
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Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status.
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Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe. To us, that makes it the most powerful reality, and just another word for God. Earthseed: The Books of the Living Lauren Oya Olamina
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In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.
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My characters hope for better lives.
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She found more gratification in teaching one willing student than a dozen resentful ones.
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The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one's own place, One's own people, One's own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise- Into growth and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.
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When I was between 2 and 3 years old, I got to know my first non-human being. The non-human was a cocker spaniel named Baba. We weren't friends, Baba and I, nor enemies. He wasn't my dog. He belonged to the people my mother worked for, and he lived in the house with them and us.
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...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.
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Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.
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Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow.
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In order to rise From its own ashes A phoenix First Must Burn.
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A victim of God may,Through learning adaption,Become a partner of God,A victim of God may,Through forethought and planning,Become a shaper of God.Or a victim of God may,Through shortsightedness and fear,Remain God’s victim,God’s plaything,God’s prey.
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Consider-We are bornNot with purpose,But with potential.
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Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.
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A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of superperson. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.