Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
Octavia E. ButlerRead
Not everyone has been a bully or the victim of bullies, but everyone has seen bullying, and seeing it, has responded to it by joining in or objecting, by laughing or keeping silent, by feeling disgusted or feeling interested.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights that everyone has witnessed bullying and has had some form of reaction, whether active or passive.
Octavia E. Butler's quote emphasizes that while not everyone has directly experienced bullying, everyone has observed it and made a choice in how to respond. Our reactions to bullying, whether through silence, laughter, objection, or indifference, reveal our values and character, highlighting the impact of social dynamics on individual behavior and moral responsibility.
Themes
BullyingResponseSilentSocial DynamicsMorality
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about social responsibility, one might cite this quote to encourage active participation against bullying.
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.
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
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