Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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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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The differences you perceive between Humans-between groups of Humans-are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments
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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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He thought about that for a moment, wondered what he should say. The truth or nothing. The truth.
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A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.
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Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.
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Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant. And once you did understand them, the Humans got angry and acted as though you had stolen thoughts from their minds.
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As a black and as a woman, I didn't think that I would really want to live in any of the eras before this, because I would inevitably be worse off. I would have spent more time struggling just to prove I was human than doing my work.
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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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Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.
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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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'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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Life was treasure. The only treasure.
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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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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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...I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.
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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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'I’ll tell you,' she said softly. 'But you won’t like it.'He looked away from her. 'I asked for the truth. Whether I like it or not, I have to know.'
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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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I'm very happy alone.
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Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you're afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It's about not being able to stop at all.
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Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.
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In countries where there are no racial differences or no religious differences, people find other reasons to set aside one certain group of people and generally spit in their direction.
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We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.