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
“When you're young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusk-pulp, damp and happy.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from Cosmicomics
“Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.”
― Isabel Allende, quote from Inés of My Soul
“Thus it came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never run away from himself.”
― Sinclair Lewis, quote from Babbitt
“Knowing how little she cares about the money I could spend, makes me want to buy her the world.”
― Georgia Cates, quote from Beauty from Pain
“If you had been there you would not have noticed. You would not have noticed your own stillness in this thin slice of time. But, if you had been there and you had, in some unfathomable way, recorded the stillness, taken a negative of it as the glass plate receives the light, to be developed later, you would have known, when the thought, the recollection was finally developed, that this was the moment it began. The clock ticked. The hour struck. Everything moved again. The train was late.”
― Robert Goolrick, quote from A Reliable Wife
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