Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
Octavia E. ButlerRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
People will create divisions based on differences, whether racial, religious, or otherwise, to justify exclusion or disdain.
Octavia E. Butler's quote explores the innate tendency of humans to categorize and alienate one another, even in the absence of obvious differences such as race or religion. It suggests that the inclination to find reasons for division is deeply rooted in human nature, highlighting a persistent flaw in societal interactions where people seek scapegoats or targets for their biases.
Themes
DivisionBiasExclusionHuman NaturePrejudice
In practice
Example use cases
During a discussion about social justice, one might use this quote to illustrate the persistent nature of discrimination.
More from Octavia E. Butler
All quotes βI 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.
Octavia E. ButlerRead
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.
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.
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
Similar quotes
Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity than straigthforward and simple integrity in another. A knave would rather quarrel with a brother knave than with a fool, but he would rather avoid a quarrel with one honest man than with both. He can combat a fool by management and address, and he can conquer a knave by temptations. But the honest man is neither to be bamboozled nor bribed.
Charles Caleb ColtonRead
Crucially we haven't been figuring out how to live in oneness, with the Earth & every other living thing; we have just been insanely trying to figure out how to live with each other, billions of each other, only we're not living with each other our crazy selves are living with each other, and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection.
Thandie NewtonRead
I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.
John LennonRead
I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of FΓ‘fnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril.
J. R. R. TolkienRead
The 'deep' civic function of the humanities . . . is something understood very well by totalitarian societies, which tend to keep close tabs on them, and to circumscribe them in direct proportion to how stringently the population is controlled.
Mark SloukaRead
Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.
Joseph ConradRead