Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
Octavia E. ButlerRead
I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
Interpretation
Children can exhibit intolerance from a very young age, as they learn behaviors from their surroundings.
In this quote, Octavia E. Butler reflects on the early development of prejudiced attitudes among young children. She suggests that intolerance is not a trait that develops solely through experience, but is often absorbed from societal influences, indicating the need for conscious guidance and education to foster tolerance from a young age.
In practice
During a workshop on diversity, this quote can highlight the importance of teaching children about tolerance.
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.
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.
Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.
Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.
There is always a place I can take someone's curiosity and land where they end up enlightened when we're done. That's my challenge as an educator. No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.
I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline. It didn't have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, 'Hey, here's the key. Here's the key to understanding life and all its forms.'
Treat your audience like poets and geniuses and they’ll have the chance to become them.
We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.
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