"We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose."
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Quote collection
Octavia Butler quotes (page 2 of 6)
110 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"No, I think the future of humanity will be like the past, we'll do what we've always done and there will still be human beings. Granted, there will always be people doing something different and there are a lot of possibilities."
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"I'm a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive."
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"Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned."
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"Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be."
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"Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces."
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"You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer."
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"I'm me, and I'm here, and I'm writing."
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"Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it."
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"That which could hunger, could starve."
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"I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you."
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"The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing."
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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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"The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars."
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"I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing."
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"Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to."
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"Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable."
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"Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status."
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"Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live."
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