Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
Octavia E. ButlerRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the complexity of human nature beyond simple categories of good and evil.
Octavia E. Butler expresses that she does not limit her writing to the conventional notions of good and evil; rather, she focuses on the intricacies of human behavior and motivations. She highlights the idea that everyone, regardless of their moral standing, exhibits a range of actions and emotions, reflecting the depth and diversity of human experiences.
Themes
Human NatureGood And EvilBehaviorComplexityWriting
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about character development in literature, this quote can serve to illustrate the importance of depicting realistic human complexity.
More from Octavia E. Butler
All quotes βMy 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
Similar quotes
The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that we were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition; it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.
Thomas BrowneRead
Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.
Eugene O'NeillRead
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.
Charles Horton CooleyRead
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress.
Frederick DouglassRead
There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words.
Fyodor DostoevskyRead