Quotes from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

296 pages

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“Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us.”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements


“And for those of us from communities with historic collective trauma, we must understand that each of us is already science fiction walking around on two legs. Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us.”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements


“Because many of the people who were taken by the wasting disease happened to be white, God was not a viable culprit.”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements


“Visionary fiction” is a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice. We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, because the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements


“Together they unlocked potential in one another. They worked hard and played harder, until the work felt like play. Everything”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements



“hipsters and entrepreneurs were complicated locusts. they ate up everything in sight, but they meant well.”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements


“She felt the night air on her, pretending she was somewhere else, in some other time. She often did this before she did something reckless. Her hope was that, if she died, her soul would travel to the last beautiful place she imagined.”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements


“He turned and looked her solemnly in the eyes. “Is it too much to ask for a happy ending?” She smiled sadly. “I don’t think there are any happy endings left.”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements


“Billions of little silver holes poked through the darkness but never threatened to break the fabric.”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements


“God is one answer to our need to explain ourselves, to make sense of ourselves. But the moment you just accept yourself, then no explanation is needed, and god is everything together and nothing in particular.”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements



“and she noticed who stayed, and it was the same people who had always been there.”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements


“You know, even if we succeed, some of them aren’t going to want to come with us,”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements


Popular quotes

“As the music played over the speakers and the waterfall in the pool filled the silence around us, I knew that, without a doubt, I had just been ruined.”
― Abbi Glines, quote from Misbehaving


“The gene,” Dr. Narcejac-Boileau said, “is associated with social dominance and strong control over other people. We have isolated it in sports leaders, CEOs, and heads of state. We believe the gene is found in all dictators throughout history.”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Next


“Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.”
― Sigmund Freud, quote from Totem and Taboo


“And so she cut out her heart and offered it as a sacrifice. She would pay whatever price her mother Wallachia demanded.
“Make me prince,” she said without feeling.”
― Kiersten White, quote from And I Darken


“–Beatriz se llevó mi nariz, en un desliz.”
― James Dashner, quote from The Maze Runner Series


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