Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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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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Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be.
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...I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.
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We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.
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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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'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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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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'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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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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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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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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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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Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.
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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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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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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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Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
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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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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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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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Beware At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease
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When I meet a woman who attracts me, I prefer women,' she said. 'And when I meet a man who attracts me, I prefer men.' 'You mean you haven't made up your mind yet.' 'I mean exactly what I said. I told you you wouldn't like it. Most people who ask want me definitely on one side or the other.