I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the struggle of individuals who face societal opposition and discrimination.
Octavia Butler's quote encourages reflection on the profound challenges that individuals face when society is aligned against them. It underscores the importance of empathy and understanding for those who experience systemic biases, illustrating how oppressive societal forces can affect personal identity and well-being.
In practice
During a community event on social justice, this quote can be used to spark a discussion about systemic inequality.
What I'm working on now - I'm back to fantasy, although considering that it's me, I'm turning it into a kind of science fantasy. It's a vampire story - but my vampires are biological vampires. They didn't become vampires because someone bit them; they were born that way.
Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.
There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.
You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.
Absolute consciousness is manifest here in every circumstance of daily life because it is everywhere full and perfect. Consciousness is said to be the cause of all things because it is everywhere emergent as each manifest entity.
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
...I will not allow books to prove any thing." "But how shall we prove any thing?" "We never shall.
When you are not the doer how can the attachment happen? You do a small thing and you become attached. You say, "I have done this." You would like everybody to know that you have done this and you have done that. This ego is the barrier for the supreme understanding. Drop the doer and let things happen. That's what Tilopa means by being loose and natural.
While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State.
I want you to think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass.
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