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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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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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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Life was treasure. The only treasure.
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Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be.
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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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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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Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.
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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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Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.
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I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
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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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The only lasting truth is change. God is change.
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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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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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We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.
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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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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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Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.
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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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'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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She glanced at him. 'What gods do you respect?''None.''And why not?''I help myself,' he said.
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You are horror and beauty in rare combination.