Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Writing fiction helps us make sense of life and understand ourselves and others better.
In this quote, Octavia E. Butler expresses the transformative power of fiction writing. She suggests that through storytelling, we can impose a sense of order on the chaos of real life and create complex characters, providing insights into human nature that may elude us in our everyday interactions. Writing becomes a means of exploring deeper truths and connections within ourselves and between people.
Themes
WritingFictionCharacterOrderHumanity
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of storytelling in literature.
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.
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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.
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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
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