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
What this quote means
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.
Themes
PainMental HealthTraumaDelusionSuffering
In practice
Example use cases
In a mental health awareness campaign, you could use this quote to emphasize the legitimacy of mental suffering.
More from Octavia E. Butler
All quotes →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
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.
Octavia E. ButlerRead
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