Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
Octavia E. ButlerRead
As a black and as a woman, I didn't think that I would really want to live in any of the eras before this, because I would inevitably be worse off. I would have spent more time struggling just to prove I was human than doing my work.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Butler highlights the struggles faced by marginalized individuals in the past compared to the present.
In this quote, Octavia E. Butler reflects on her identity as a Black woman and how living in previous eras would have meant facing greater challenges due to systemic discrimination and prejudice. She emphasizes that in those times, the fight for basic recognition and humanity would have overshadowed her ability to pursue her work and passions, making it a stark contrast to her experiences today.
Themes
IdentityStrugglesMarginalizationEmpowermentHistory
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote at a discussion on social justice and equality.
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.
Octavia E. ButlerRead
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.
Octavia E. ButlerRead
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.
Octavia E. ButlerRead
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