“That educated didn’t mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.”
“Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of "wrong" ideas.”
“Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.”
“...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.”
“Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn't say them, couldn't sort out my feelings about them, couldn't keep them bottled inside me.”
“As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else's trouble.”
“Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred.
... Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture - quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.”
“Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.”
“She means the devil with people who say you're anything but what you are.”
“I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”
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Octavia E Butler Bloodchild quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“Shyness is shit. It isn’t cute or feminine or appealing. It’s torment, and it’s shit.”
“If you work hard enough at something that doesn't matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.”
“Read every day and learn from what you read.”
“Was an eternity of absolute ease just another name for hell?”
“What are you?" I whispered."What are we to you?" She lay still, rested her head on her topmost coil. "You know me as no other does," she said softly. "You must decide.”
“I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.”
“At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing thinking - whoever "everyone" happens to be this year.”
“When I was older, I decided that getting a rejection slip was like being told your child was ugly. You got mad and didn’t believe a word of it. Besides, look at all the really ugly literary children out there in the world being published and doing fine!”
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Octavia E Butler quotes on writing
“Sometimes writing about a thing makes it easier to stand.”
“I began writing about power because I had so little.”
“You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”
“I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.”
“I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.”
“Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.”
“Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn't say them, couldn't sort out my feelings about them, couldn't keep them bottled inside me.”
“I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.”
“Writing is difficult. You do it all alone without encouragement and without any certainty that you'll ever be published or paid or even that you'll be able to finish the particular work you've begun. It isn't easy to persist amid all that. [...] Sometimes when I'm interviewed, the interviewer either compliments me on my 'talent', my 'gift' or asks me how I discovered it. [...] I used to struggle to answer this politely, to explain that I didn't believe much in writing talent. 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.”
“My love of writing is an outgrowth of my love of reading. Both helped me to escape boredom, to perform thought experiments, and to deal with the daily news. I can create a world that makes more sense than this one.”
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Octavia E Butler quotes on love
“Kindness eases change Love quiets fear”
“My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.”
Octavia Butler quotes about change
“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.”
“Kindness eases change Love quiets fear”
“Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change— Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. The universe is God’s self-portrait.”
“Your teachers
Are all around you.
All that you perceive,
All that you experience,
All that is given to you
or taken from you,
All that you love or hate,
need or fear
Will teach you--
If you will learn.
God is your first
and your last teacher.
God is your harshest teacher:
subtle,
demanding.
Learn or die.”
“Change
is the one unavoidable,
irresistible,
ongoing reality of the universe.
To us,
that makes it the most powerful reality,
and just another word for
God.
”