Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
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Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.
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I lost an arm on my last trip home.
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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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At school I was always taller than the rest of my class, and because I was an only child, I was comfortable with adults but shy and awkward with other kids. I was quiet, bookish, and in spite of my size, hopeless at sports. In short, I was different. And even in the earliest grades, I got pounded for it.
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Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
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Science fiction is not formulaic.
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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.
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When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.
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I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.
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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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The norm is white, apparently, in the view of people who see things in that way. For them, the only reason you would introduce a black character is to introduce this kind of abnormality. Usually, it's because you're telling a story about racism or at least about race.
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The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing.
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Too many writers get into that gross-'em-out factor.
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I had novels to write, so I wrote them.
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Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world.
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All strugglesAre essentiallyPower struggles.Who will rule,Who will lead,Who will define,refine,confine,design,Who will dominate.All strugglesAre essentiallyPower struggles, And mostare no more intellectualthan two ramsknocking their heads together.
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I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.
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Several years ago, when I was about to start a novel, I thought I might get some mileage out of the idea of a civilization in which people somehow felt - that is, they shared - all the pain and all the pleasure they caused one another.
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To get along with God, Consider the consequences of your behavior. Earthseed: The Books of the Living
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A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.
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I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children's stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, 'Can't you write anything normal?'
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'He’s a fair man.'I looked at him, startled.'I said fair,' he repeated. 'Not likable.'I kept quiet. His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.
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The differences you perceive between Humans-between groups of Humans-are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments