Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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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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The big talent is persistence.
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A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.
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Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be.
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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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When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.
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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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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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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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Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.
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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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My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.
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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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Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave.
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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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I'm very happy alone.
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I lost an arm on my last trip home.
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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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People who want to write either do it or they don't. At last I began to say that my most important talent - or habit - was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.
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Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.
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'I didn’t want to scare you. We don’t want to scare anyone.''No? Well, sometimes it’s a good thing to scare people. Sometimes fear is all that will keep them from doing stupid things.'
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I had novels to write, so I wrote them.
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He was surprised when I ignored him. He is wealthy and arrogant and used to being listened to even when what he says is nonsense-as it often is.