Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
Octavia E. ButlerRead
I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the importance of personal experience and familial connections in understanding complex social issues.
Octavia E. Butler emphasizes that through conversations with family and her own research, she was able to grasp the profound struggles of being black in a challenging historical context. This suggests that personal narratives and familial ties are crucial in enriching one's understanding of broader social experiences, especially those that are deeply rooted in identity and history.
Themes
FamilyExperienceIdentityBlacknessHistory
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on the importance of personal narratives in literature.
More from Octavia E. Butler
All quotes →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.
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My characters hope for better lives.
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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.
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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.
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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
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