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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Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.
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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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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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A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.
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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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Life was treasure. The only treasure.
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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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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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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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Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.
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Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.
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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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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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I'm very happy alone.
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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 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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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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'Yes,' he said, 'intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.'
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We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.
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I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
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The major tragedies in life, there's just no compensation. But the minor ones you can always write about. It's my way of dealing, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than psychiatrists. The story, you see, will get you through.
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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.'