Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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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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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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I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
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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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'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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We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.
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Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be.
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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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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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'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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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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'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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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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Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.
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Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
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When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.
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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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Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.
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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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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?
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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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Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.
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Beware At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease