Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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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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I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
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I can’t do it, Joachim. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. A long leash is still a leash. And Coransee will still be at the other end of it, holding on.
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With a disaster like global warming, it's too late to worry about when it's looming except to figure out how to adapt to it.
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We are a naturally hierarchical species.
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So he had locked her in the closet. Some of his people, ignorant and fearful, could not quite believe her illness was not contagious. Badger locked her away from them for her own safety. She had seen for herself how eager they were to get her out of their sight.
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I'm not pessimistic about much of anything.
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Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.
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He showed me his fantastic library first, and that helped me warm to him a little. A guy with a room like that in his house couldn’t be all bad.
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If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?
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'I’m not a demagogue.''That’s too bad. That leaves the field to people who are demagogues-to the Jarrets of the world. And there have always been Jarrets. Probably there always will be.'
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I'm comfortably asocial - a hermit in the middle of a large city, a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive.
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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.
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Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.
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Not everyone has been a bully or the victim of bullies, but everyone has seen bullying, and seeing it, has responded to it by joining in or objecting, by laughing or keeping silent, by feeling disgusted or feeling interested.
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The big talent is persistence.
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How dull it is to have people defining you.
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All that you touchYou Change. All that you ChangeChanges you. The only lasting truthIs Change. GodIs Change.
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Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
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I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.
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I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
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I don't know how much of a market there is for space opera. Just because it's in the movies doesn't mean magazines are buying it.
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People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is of course you wouldn't.
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I got up to leave. There was nothing more to be said. He had asked for what he knew I could not give, and I had refused.