Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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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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Are you Earthseed? Do you believe? Belief will not save you. Only actions guided and shaped by belief and knowledge will save you. BeliefInitiates and guides action - or it does 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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Life was treasure. The only treasure.
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Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.
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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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'Yori, Human purpose isn’t what you say it is or what I say it is. It’s what your biology says it is-what your genes say it is.'
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She was too alert, too alive not to have the kind of mind that probed and reached and got her into trouble now and then.
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I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
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The only lasting truth is change. God is change.
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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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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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Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be.
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The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.
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'Your God doesn’t care about you at all,' Travis said.'All the more reason to care about myself and others.'
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He thought about that for a moment, wondered what he should say. The truth or nothing. The truth.
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Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.
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We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.
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'It was an old passion,' he said. 'I haven’t touched a violin for months. I didn’t know what that would be like.''What is it like?' she asked.He began to walk so that she almost missed his answer. 'An amputation,' he whispered.
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If there's any single talent a writer needs, it's persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.
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When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.
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You are horror and beauty in rare combination.
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I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.
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I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.