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
“I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.”
― Henry James, quote from The Turn of the Screw
“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Dispossessed
“Oh, man," Xavier groaned. "See what you've done--now I'm stressing."
"You can't! You're the stable one!"
Xavier laughed and I realized his distress had been feigned to illustrate a point. He wasn't worried in the slightest.
"Just relax. Go and run a bath or have a shot of brandy."
"Okay."
"That second bit was a joke. We both know you can't hold your liquor.”
― Alexandra Adornetto, quote from Halo
“How many people do you know who are obsessed with their work, who are type A or have stress related diseases and who can’t slow down? They can’t slow down because they use their routine to distract themselves, to reduce life to only its practical considerations. And they do this to avoid recalling how uncertain they are about why they live.”
― James Redfield, quote from The Celestine Prophecy
“I had no idea you’d all be so worried.”
― E.L. James, quote from Fifty Shades Trilogy
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