Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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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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'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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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.'
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All religions are ultimately cargo cults.Adherents perform required rituals, followspecific rules, and expect to be supernaturallygifted with desired rewards-long life,honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth,victory over opponents, immortality afterdeath, any desired rewards.
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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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Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter.
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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.
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Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.
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Most vampires I have discovered are men for some reason. I guess it's because of Dracula; people are kind of feeding off that.
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Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.
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Now I have been raped.It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.
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Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
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Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.
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First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.
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Beware:IgnoranceProtects itselfIgnorancePromotes suspicion.SuspicionEngenders fear.Fear quails,Irrational and blind,Or fear looms,Defiant and closed.Blind, closed,Suspicious, afraid,IgnoranceProtects itself,And protected,Ignorance grows.
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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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Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be.
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Beware At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease
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Life is getting better, but that won’t stop a war if politicians and business people decide it’s to their advantage to have one.
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Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave.
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Most of us don't have to worry about being shot of we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.
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If you don’t care about my people, why should I care about yours?