Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
Octavia E. ButlerRead
My characters hope for better lives.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the aspiration and desire for improvement in one's life.
Octavia E. Butler's quote emphasizes the innate desire of characters, and by extension, people, to seek out better lives despite the challenges they face. This hope for improvement is a fundamental aspect of the human experience, driving individuals to pursue their dreams and strive for greatness, even in the face of adversity.
In practice
In a motivational speech about perseverance and growth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If there are kids who want to follow in my footsteps, I'd say that my shoes are too big for them to fill! But their shoe size is just perfect.
I live in constant anticipation of good stuff. It's not being 'Pollyanna' about things, but most stories don't have the ending we would give them right away. The better endings come later.
Create the world you want, and fill it with the opportunities that matter to you.
Wouldn't it be great if we all grew up to be what we wanted to be? The world would be full of nurses, firemen, and ballerinas.
I think that young women and little girls need to see that they don't have to be the damsel in distress. They don't have to not show their strength. They don't have to be whatever the stereotype is or the tropes that we go to in our minds.
There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
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