Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
Octavia E. ButlerRead
Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote warns against the dangers of uncritically accepting the beliefs and perceptions imposed by others.
Octavia E. Butler emphasizes the significant influence that external voices have on our thoughts, observations, and interpretations of reality. She urges us to be cautious, as we often adopt ideas and perspectives not necessarily our own, which can lead to a distorted view of the world. The quote serves as a reminder to engage critically with information and to seek our own understanding to break free from societal or authoritative constraints.
Themes
PerceptionThoughtInfluenceRealityAwareness
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about media influence, one might use this quote to illustrate how narratives are shaped.
More from Octavia E. Butler
All quotes →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.
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My characters hope for better lives.
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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.
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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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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.
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