Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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How completely, how thoroughly he has stolen my child. I have never even tried to forgive him.
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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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You are horror and beauty in rare combination.
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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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I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.
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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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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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She glanced at him. 'What gods do you respect?''None.''And why not?''I help myself,' he said.
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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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Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.
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I'm very happy alone.
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Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.
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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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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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Life was treasure. The only treasure.
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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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Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.
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...I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.
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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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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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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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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.