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.
Octavia E. ButlerRead
Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
Interpretation
Both imagined pain and real trauma can cause significant suffering.
Octavia E. Butler's quote highlights the profound impact that mental suffering can have on an individual. It emphasizes that whether pain arises from an actual traumatic experience or is a product of one's own mind, the emotional and psychological toll is equally valid and significant, reminding us that mental health challenges deserve the same recognition and understanding as physical ones.
In practice
In a mental health awareness campaign, you could use this quote to emphasize the legitimacy of mental suffering.
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.
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.
We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.
Psychopaths are social predators, and like all predators, they are looking for feeding grounds. Wherever you get power, prestige and money, you will find them.
We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.
The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.
It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.
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