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Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.

Octavia Butler

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Octavia Butler
Straight
Dangerous
Hand
Religion
Prod
Hands
Misused
Women
Narrow
Always
Keeping
People
Useful

More quotes by Octavia Butler

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I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.
Octavia Butler
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If there's any single talent a writer needs, it's persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.
Octavia Butler
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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.
Octavia Butler
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Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish.
Octavia Butler
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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.
Octavia Butler
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Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
Octavia Butler
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I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.
Octavia Butler
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You are horror and beauty in rare combination.
Octavia Butler
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Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status.
Octavia Butler
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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.
Octavia Butler
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Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.
Octavia Butler
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A victim of God may, Through learning adaption, Become a partner of God, A victim of God may, Through forethought and planning, Become a shaper of God. Or a victim of God may, Through shortsightedness and fear, Remain God's victim, God's plaything, God's prey.
Octavia Butler
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I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.
Octavia Butler
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To get along with God, Consider the consequences of your behavior. Earthseed: The Books of the Living
Octavia Butler
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Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant. And once you did understand them, the Humans got angry and acted as though you had stolen thoughts from their minds.
Octavia Butler
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To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
Octavia Butler
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Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be.
Octavia Butler
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I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
Octavia Butler
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Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.
Octavia Butler
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I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.
Octavia Butler