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Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

Octavia Butler

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Octavia Butler
Mean
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Civilization
Groups
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Individual
Adaptation
Means
Ongoing
Many
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The big talent is persistence.
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The differences you perceive between Humans-between groups of Humans-are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments
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I'm literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.
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Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
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He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.
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I lost an arm on my last trip home.
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The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.
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Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
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Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.
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There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.
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A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't.
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No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.
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Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes - they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes - a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day.
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The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing.
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We give our dead To the orchards And the groves. We give our dead To life.
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Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
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To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
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Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status.
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Most of us don't have to worry about being shot of we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.
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The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one's own place, One's own people, One's own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise- Into growth and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.
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