Octavia E. Butler · 214 pages
Rating: (8.4K votes)
“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Bloodchild and Other Stories
“Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Bloodchild and Other Stories
“Shyness is shit. It isn’t cute or feminine or appealing. It’s torment, and it’s shit.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Bloodchild and Other Stories
“I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Bloodchild and Other Stories
“What are you?" I whispered."What are we to you?"
She lay still, rested her head on her topmost coil. "You know me as no other does," she said softly. "You must decide.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Bloodchild and Other Stories
“If you work hard enough at something that doesn't matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Bloodchild and Other Stories
“Read every day and learn from what you read.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Bloodchild and Other Stories
“Bloodchild" is my pregnant man story.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Bloodchild and Other Stories
“She just couldn't face caring for a child all alone.'
'People do it all the time.'
'She wasn't "people", she was herself. She knew what she could handle and what she couldn't.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Bloodchild and Other Stories
“Shyness is shit. It isn’t cute or feminine or appealing. It’s torment, and it’s shit. I”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Bloodchild and Other Stories
“It’s too easy to follow bad but attractive leaders, embrace pleasurable but destructive habits, ignore looming disaster because maybe it won’t happen after all—or maybe it will only happen to other people. That kind of thinking is part of what it means to be adolescent.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Bloodchild and Other Stories
“This is what happiness is, past the rubbish of its overuse as a word, past the cracked gloss of the letters that mean nothing when strung together. They mean something now, and I know what it’s like when you and someone else are right together. How simple it is, and how amazing.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“راهنوا فقط عندما تسمحون لأنفسكم بالخسارة. أعني من دون أن تجدوا أنفسكم تنامون على مقعد في حديقة أو فاتتكم 3 أو 4 وجبات. الأهم، هو أن تدفعوا إيجار الشقة أولاً. تجنبوا الضغوط ص 159”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories
“All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell. Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you.”
― Nora Raleigh Baskin, quote from Anything But Typical
“Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher
“Here is light. You will say that it is not a living entity, but you miss the point that it is more, not less. Without occupying space, it fills the universe. It nourishes everything, yet itself feeds upon destruction. We claim to control it, but does it not perhaps cultivate us as a source of food? May it not be that all wood grows so that it can be set ablaze, and that men and women are born to kindle them?”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Citadel of the Autarch
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