Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
Octavia E. ButlerRead
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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the sadness of animals in captivity and the impact it can have on human perception.
Octavia E. Butler's observation of a chimpanzee in a zoo serves as a powerful commentary on the ethics of animal captivity and the emotional lives of animals. It highlights how witnessing the suffering of another being can evoke a profound sense of empathy and discomfort, prompting one to confront the moral implications of keeping animals in such conditions for human entertainment.
In practice
In a speech about animal welfare, I might share this quote to illustrate the emotional depth of animals.
Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
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.
My characters hope for better lives.
I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.
The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.
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.
There's a lot of money to be made by strip-mining and drilling the dirtiest oil on the planet. But why should the rest of us pay the price?
Russia! Russia... Everything in you is open, desolate and level; your squat towns barely protrude in the midst of the plains like dots, like counters; there is nothing to tempt or enchant the onlooker's gaze. But what is this inscrutable, mysterious force that draws me to you?
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.
You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. So what plants have - while we have consciousness, toolmaking, language, they have biochemistry.
I have always tempered my killing with respect for the game pursued. I see the animal not only as a target, but as a living creature with more freedom than I will ever have. I take that life if I can, with regret as well as joy, and with the sure knowledge that nature's way of fang and claw and starvation are a far crueler fate than I bestow.
Water is the best of all things.
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