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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.
Octavia E. Butler -
I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.
Octavia E. Butler
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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.
Octavia E. Butler -
Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
Octavia E. Butler -
We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.So much agony caused, so much evil done in God’s name.
Octavia E. Butler -
I think climbing mountains or buildings or whatever has been a really good metaphor for finishing my work. Because no matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can't possibly do this, somehow you do.
Octavia E. Butler -
He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.
Octavia E. Butler -
'From what I’ve read,' I said to him, 'the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is to survive until it goes sane again.'
Octavia E. Butler
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Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave.
Octavia E. Butler -
Now I have been raped.It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.
Octavia E. Butler -
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.
Octavia E. Butler -
If you don’t care about my people, why should I care about yours?
Octavia E. Butler -
Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have.
Octavia E. Butler -
Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.
Octavia E. Butler
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Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about.
Octavia E. Butler -
I might not have believed this if a Human had said it. Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everybody had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant.
Octavia E. Butler -
Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.
Octavia E. Butler -
The Destiny of EarthseedIs to take root among the stars.
Octavia E. Butler -
'When it comes to strangers with guns,' I told her, 'I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust.'
Octavia E. Butler -
They had clearly feared turn-of-the-century irrationality-religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological intolerance and corporate greed.
Octavia E. Butler
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There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.
Octavia E. Butler -
If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it.
Octavia E. Butler -
A treeCannot growIn its parents’ shadows.
Octavia E. Butler -
A pet. In pets, free will was tolerated only as long as the pet owner found it amusing.
Octavia E. Butler