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Octavia Butler

Octavia E. Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer, one of the very few African-American women in the field.

Quotes

 * There is a vast and terrible sibling rivalry going within the human family as we satisfy our desires for territory, dominance, and exclusivity. How strange: In our ongoing eagerness to create aliens, we express our need for them, and we express our deep fear of being alone in a universe that cares no more for us than it does for stones or suns or any other fragments of itself. And yet we are unable to get along with those aliens who are closest to us, those aliens who are of course ourselves. All the more need then to create more cooperative aliens, supernatural beings or intelligences from the stars. Sometimes we just need someone to talk to, someone we can trust to listen and care, someone who knows us as we really are and as we rarely get to know one another, someone whose whole agenda is us. Like children, we do still need great and powerful parent figures and we need invisible friends. What is adult behavior after all but modified, disguised, excused childhood behavior? The more educated, the more sophisticated, the more thoughtful we are, the more able we are to conceal the child within us. No matter. The child persists and it's lonely.
 * "The Monophobic Response" (1995), anthologized in Dark Matter by Sheree Thomas (2000)

 * I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people.
 * interview

 * I began writing the book with the thought that maybe what we needed was the biological conscience. It does seem to me that there are too many people in this world who would just as soon wipe out half their country if they could rule the other half.
 * interview

 * I want to write about what's going to happen if we keep doing what we've been doing, if we keep recklessly endangering the environment, if we keep paying no attention to economic realities, if we keep paying no attention to educational needs, if we keep doing a lot of the things that are hurting us now. And that's what I wound up writing about. And everything else just kind of fell into it, fell into place.
 * interview

 * I did not read any Langston Hughes until I was an adult, but I remember being carried away by him and Gwendolyn Brooks. When I was growing up, the only blacks you came across in school were slaves-who were always well treated-and later, when we got to individuals, Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. Booker T. Washington started a college, and Carver did something with peanuts; we never knew what. We did not read anything by a black writer except [James Weldon] Johnson's The Creation, and that was in high school. We managed to get through adolescence without being introduced to any black culture.
 * 1996 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009)

 * When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn't in any of this stuff I read. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, any way. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing.
 * in New York Times (2000). Attributed in Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009)

 * I was in classes sometimes where I was the only Black person and tend to either get ignored or get petted on the head a lot. Neither is in the slightest useful so I was eager to get away from that and Harlan was not interested in doing either.
 * 1994 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler

 * Obviously in some places you will meet with some nastiness, but it isn't general. The only place I was ever called "nigger," had someone scream nigger at me in public, was in Boston, for goodness sakes. It wasn't a person going to a conference, it was just a stranger who happened to see me standing, waiting for a traffic light.
 * 1990 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler

 * My favorite collection of slave narratives was a nineteen-volume set called The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. It was assembled in the 1930s by the Writer's Project [of the Works Progress Administration], and these people interviewed the slaves who were left, the very last ones. It was depressing reading not only because bad things happened to slaves, but because slavery could become so pedestrian when you read enough of it, so ordinary. I remember someone telling me that they'd read the Harriet Jacobs narrative, and they said it was mild compared to other slave narratives. And, horribly enough, it was, but that doesn't make her any less a slave. It wasn't something you'd want to undergo.
 * 2003 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler

 * Everything is political in one way or another.
 * 1997 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler

 * I think the most interesting thing about looking back now at the 1950s is how familiar things would be...We can do a lot of things faster, bigger, higher, that sort of thing, but they're essentially the same things. We're talking on the telephone. Now of course we could be going on computers, but even so we would be typing and looking at a screen and in those days we had typing and we had screens. We're connected. The cars might look different but they're still internal combustion engine cars for the most part. All the things that we thought, the flying cars, and buildings a mile high...The nonsense, I like to call it. The things that would make our era un-recognizable are mainly the social things. Imagine going back to the fifties and explaining that we're now discussing homosexual marriage. In the fifties, you didn't even hear the word homosexual, let alone that they might get married. I mean, black and white was illegal, forget two people of the same sex. And it was still OK to lynch people in different parts of our country. It was still OK to expect people to be openly racist in all parts of our country. Interesting how that goes in and out of fashion.
 * interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler

 * I know a lot of people are where I was several years ago, when I was getting started with writing, wondering how they might get started as writers. And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write-every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing. Second, read every day. Read voraciously and omnivorously, whatever's out there. You never know what's gonna grab you. Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes-they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes-a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day. A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't. Those are some of the suggestions I give to my young writers.
 * 2004 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler

 * ("Are there social movements that you identify with or are inspired by?") OB: Not terribly. Not in the sense of joining something. I'm with the ABB-"Anybody But Bush"-movement right now [winter 2003]. For the first time in my life I was sending campaign donations to a political candidate-Dean, as a matter of fact, before he fell out. There are a lot of things that I care about, and I mention some of them with relation to the two Parable books. I belong to a lot of environmentalist organizations. I really feel that it's important we stop playing games, and the idea that we're somehow going to improve the forests by having people go in and chop down the most valuable trees is just obscene, and the idea that we are going to lose environmental legislation for clean air and clean water that earlier groups worked really hard for is obscene. I mean we're doing such unutterably stupid things that I can't not pay attention to it. Then there are things like war and peace, of course. I found the war [in Iraq] to be totally unnecessary, and I said so before we got into it. We're going down a lot of wrong paths. The books are warnings, they're "If this goes on..." novels. Nobody really needed warning, everybody could see that we're sliding in the wrong directions, especially with regard to things like global warming. But nothing is being done, at least on the part of our national government.
 * 2003 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler

Patternmaster (1976)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Seed to Harvest published by Grand Central Publishing

 * I can’t do it, Joachim. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. A long leash is still a leash. And Coransee will still be at the other end of it, holding on.
 * Chapter 4 (p. 689)

 * “I’ll tell you,” she said softly. “But you won’t like it.” He looked away from her. “I asked for the truth. Whether I like it or not, I have to know.”
 * Chapter 6 (p. 717)

Mind of My Mind (1977)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Seed to Harvest published by Grand Central Publishing

 * He showed me his fantastic library first, and that helped me warm to him a little. A guy with a room like that in his house couldn’t be all bad.
 * Chapter 2 (p. 288)

 * A pet. In pets, free will was tolerated only as long as the pet owner found it amusing.
 * Chapter 5 (p. 344)

Kindred (1979)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback published by Beacon Press (Bluestreak)

 * Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about.
 * Chapter 3, “The Fall” section 5 (p. 81).

 * “He’s a fair man.” I looked at him, startled. “I said fair,” he repeated. “Not likable.” I kept quiet. His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.
 * Chapter 4, “The Fight” section 6 (p. 134).

 * He didn’t look all right to me. “Has anyone gone for the doctor?” “Marse Tom don’t hardly get Doc West for ague. He says all the doc knows is bleeding and blistering and purging and puking and making folks sicker than they was to start.”
 * Chapter 5, “The Storm” section 3 (p. 202).

 * Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have.
 * Chapter 5, “The Storm” section 13 (pp. 236-37).

 * I got up to leave. There was nothing more to be said. He had asked for what he knew I could not give, and I had refused.
 * Chapter 6, “The Rope” section 4 (p. 257).

Wild Seed (1980)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Seed to Harvest published by Grand Central Publishing

 * Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave.
 * Chapter 1 (p. 11)

 * She was too alert, too alive not to have the kind of mind that probed and reached and got her into trouble now and then.
 * Chapter 1 (p. 18)

 * She glanced at him. “What gods do you respect?” “None.” “And why not?” “I help myself,” he said.
 * Chapter 1 (p. 20)

 * He was surprised when I ignored him. He is wealthy and arrogant and used to being listened to even when what he says is nonsense—as it often is.
 * Chapter 2 (p. 25)

 * “What were they saying?” Daly asked. “They disapprove of your profession,” Doro told him. “Heathen savages,” Daly muttered. “They’re like animals. They’re all cannibals.” “These aren’t,” Doro said, “though some of the their neighbors are.” “All of them,” Daly insisted. “Just give them the chance.” Doro smiled. “Well, no doubt the missionaries will reach them eventually and teach them to practice only symbolic cannibalism.” Daly jumped. He considered himself a pious man in spite of his work. “You shouldn’t say such things,” he whispered. “Not even you are beyond the reach of God.” “Spare me your mythology,” Doro said, “and your righteous indignation.” Daly had been Doro’s man too long to be pampered in such matters. “At least we cannibals are honest about what we do,” Doro continued. “We don’t pretend as your slavers do to be acting for the benefit of our victims’ souls. We don’t tell ourselves we’ve caught them to teach them civilized religion.”
 * Chapter 3 (p. 42)

 * Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.
 * Chapter 6 (p. 100)

 * “What will they do when they have only the herbs” he asked her. “Live or die as best they can,” she said. “Everything truly alive dies sooner or later.”
 * Chapter 14 (p. 247)

Clay's Ark (1984)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Seed to Harvest published by Grand Central Publishing

 * “You’re bright,” Lupe said to her softly. “Very bright, but stubborn. You think you can choose your realities. You can’t.”
 * Chapter 12 (p. 522)

 * “It was an old passion,” he said. “I haven’t touched a violin for months. I didn’t know what that would be like.” “What is it like?” she asked. He began to walk so that she almost missed his answer. “An amputation,” he whispered.
 * Chapter 14 (p. 533)

 * They had clearly feared turn-of-the-century irrationality—religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological intolerance and corporate greed.
 * Chapter 23 (p. 583)

 * So he had locked her in the closet. Some of his people, ignorant and fearful, could not quite believe her illness was not contagious. Badger locked her away from them for her own safety. She had seen for herself how eager they were to get her out of their sight.
 * Chapter 28 (p. 609)

Dawn (1987)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Lilith's Brood published by Grand Central Publishing

 * “Yes,” he said, “intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.”
 * Part I “Womb” chapter 5 (p. 39)

 * Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter.
 * Part III “Nursery” chapter 1 (p. 126)

 * “I don’t understand why the sight of you should scare me so,” Joseph said. He did not sound frightened. “You don’t look that threatening. Just...very different.” “Different is threatening to most species,” Nikanj answered. “Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it’s true for you.”
 * Part III “Nursery” chapter 12 (p. 186)

 * She found more gratification in teaching one willing student than a dozen resentful ones.
 * Part IV “The Training Floor” chapter 9 (p. 242)

Adulthood Rites (1988)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Lilith's Brood published by Grand Central Publishing

 * “Human beings fear difference,” Lilith had told him once. “Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don’t understand this, you will. You’ll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior.” And she had put her hand on his hair. “When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference.”
 * Part II “Phoenix” chapter 4 (p. 329)

 * “I didn’t want to scare you. We don’t want to scare anyone.” “No? Well, sometimes it’s a good thing to scare people. Sometimes fear is all that will keep them from doing stupid things.”
 * Part II “Phoenix” chapter 15 (p. 381)

 * If you don’t care about my people, why should I care about yours?
 * Part II “Phoenix” chapter 15 (p. 383)

 * He thought about that for a moment, wondered what he should say. The truth or nothing. The truth.
 * Part IV “Home” chapter 5 (p. 501)

 * “Yori, Human purpose isn’t what you say it is or what I say it is. It’s what your biology says it is—what your genes say it is.”
 * Part IV “Home” chapter 5 (p. 501)

Imago (1989)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Lilith's Brood published by Grand Central Publishing

 * I might not have believed this if a Human had said it. Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everybody had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant.
 * Chapter I, “Metamorphosis” section 4 (p. 548)

 * Life was treasure. The only treasure.
 * Chapter I, “Metamorphosis” section 6 (p. 564)

 * Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.
 * Chapter II, “Exile” section 9 (p. 649)

 * Tomas stopped and looked at the three Oankali. “Do you believe in spirits?” “We believe in life,” Ahajas said. “Life after death?” Ahajas smoothed her tentacles briefly in agreement. “When I’m dead,” she said, “I will nourish other life.” “But I mean—” “If I died on a lifeless world, a world that could sustain some form of life if it were tenacious enough, organelles within each cell of my body would survive and evolve. In perhaps a thousand million years, that world would be as full of life as this one.” “...it would?” “Yes. Our ancestors have seeded a great many barren worlds that way. Nothing is more tenacious than the life we are made of. A world of life from apparent death, from dissolution. That’s what we believe in.” “Nothing more?” Ahajas became smooth enough with amusement to reflect firelight. “No, Lelka. Nothing more.”
 * Chapter II, “Exile” section 12 (pp. 662-663)

 * Humans were genetically inclined to be intolerant of difference. They could overcome the inclination, but it was a reality of the Human conflict that they often did not.
 * Chapter III, “Imago” section 7 (p. 710)

Parable of the Sower (1993)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback published by Grand Central Publishing.
 * All quotes in bold are in bold in the novel, and are excerpts from Earthseed: The Books of the Living, a fictitious book, written by the protagonist, which plays a major role in the novel. Versification is as in the original.

 * All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you.  The only lasting truth Is Change.  God Is Change.
 * Chapter 1 (p. 3)

 * A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of superperson. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.
 * Chapter 2 (p. 15)

 * People here in the neighborhood are saying she had no business going to Mars, anyway. All that money wasted on another crazy space trip when so many people here on earth can’t afford water, food, or shelter
 * (p. 17)

 * Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.
 * Chapter 3 (p. 27)

 * Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.
 * Chapter 4 (p. 29)

 * A victim of God may, Through learning adaption, Become a partner of God, A victim of God may, Through forethought and planning, Become a shaper of God. Or a victim of God may, Through shortsightedness and fear, Remain God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey.
 * Chapter 4 (p. 31)

 * Sometimes I write to keep from going crazy. There’s a world of things I don’t feel free to talk to anyone about.
 * (p. 52)

 * People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back’
 * (p. 57)

 * I realize I don’t know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic.
 * Chapter 5 (p. 58)

 * It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them.
 * (p. 65)

 * A tree Cannot grow In its parents’ shadows.
 * Chapter 7 (p. 82)

 * The Destiny of Earthseed Is to take root among the stars.
 * Chapter 7 (p. 84)

 * All struggles Are essentially Power struggles. Who will rule, Who will lead, Who will define, refine, confine, design, Who will dominate. All struggles Are essentially Power struggles, And most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.
 * Chapter 8 (p. 94)

 * Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.
 * Chapter 10 (p. 101)

 * If everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?
 * (p. 115)

 * “When it comes to strangers with guns,” I told her, “I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust.”
 * Chapter 11 (p. 122)

 * Freedom is dangerous, Cory, but it’s precious, too. You can’t just throw it away or let it slip away. You can’t sell it for bread and pottage.
 * Chapter 11 (p. 122)

 * The only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it
 * (p. 143)

 * There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.
 * Chapter 17 (p. 200)

 * “Your God doesn’t care about you at all,” Travis said. “All the more reason to care about myself and others.”
 * Chapter 18 (p. 221)

 * “From what I’ve read,” I said to him, “the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is to survive until it goes sane again.”
 * Chapter 19 (p. 229)

 * You tend to resent people you’re afraid of.
 * (p. 291)

 * I wonder what a badge is, other than a license to steal.
 * (p. 316)

Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995)

 * Who knows what we humans have that others might be willing to take in trade for a livable space on a world not our own.
 * Bloodchild

 * They can create something beautiful, useful, even something worthless. But they create. They don't destroy.
 * The Evening and the Morning and the Night

 * “Don’t you know everything?” God smiled. “No, I outgrew that trick long ago. You can’t imagine how boring it was.”
 * The Book of Martha

 * You're truly free for the first time. What could be more difficult than that?
 * The Book of Martha

Parable of the Talents (1998)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback published by Warner Aspect Books.
 * All quotes in bold are in bold in the novel, and are excerpts from Earthseed: The Books of the Living, a fictitious book, written by the protagonist, which plays a major role in the novel. Versification is as in the original.

 * Consider— We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.
 * Chapter 1 (p. 1)

 * We give our dead To the orchards And the groves. We give our dead To life.
 * Chapter 1 (p. 5)

 * Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war. Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major, nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.
 * Chapter 1 (pp. 8-9)

 * Life is getting better, but that won’t stop a war if politicians and business people decide it’s to their advantage to have one.
 * Chapter 5 (p. 90)

 * Choose your leaders
 * with wisdom and forethought.
 * To be led by a coward
 * is to be controlled
 * by all that the coward fears.
 * To be led by a fool
 * is to be led
 * by the opportunists
 * who control the fool.
 * To be led by a thief
 * is to offer up
 * your most precious treasures
 * to be stolen.
 * To be led by a liar
 * is to ask
 * to be lied to.
 * To be led by a tyrant
 * is to sell yourself
 * and those you love
 * into slavery.
 * Chapter 11 (p. 201)

 * Beware: Ignorance Protects itself Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed. Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.
 * Chapter 12 (p. 225)

 * When vision fails Direction is lost. When direction is lost Purpose may be forgotten.  When purpose if forgotten Emotion rules alone.  When emotion rules alone, Destruction...destruction.
 * Chapter 13 (p. 239)

 * Now I have been raped. It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.
 * Chapter 13 (p. 253)

 * We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking people is much easier than putting them together again. So much agony caused, so much evil done in God’s name.
 * Chapter 15 (p. 288)

 * If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it.
 * Chapter 15 (p. 291)

 * Beware:
 * All too often,
 * We say
 * What we hear others say.
 * We think
 * What we’re told that we think.
 * We see
 * What we’re permitted to see.
 * Worse!
 * We see what we’re told that we see.
 * Repetition and pride are the keys to this.
 * To hear and to see
 * Even an obvious lie
 * Again
 * And again and again
 * May be to say it,
 * Almost by reflex
 * Then to defend it
 * Because we’ve said it
 * And at last to embrace it
 * Because we’ve defended it
 * And because we cannot admit
 * That we’ve embraced and defended
 * An obvious lie.
 * Thus, without thought,
 * Without intent,
 * We make
 * Mere echoes
 * Of ourselves—
 * And we say
 * What we hear others say.
 * Chapter 18 (pp. 337-338)

 * All religions are ultimately cargo cults. Adherents perform required rituals, follow specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally gifted with desired rewards—long life, honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth, victory over opponents, immortality after death, any desired rewards.
 * Chapter 19 (p. 357)

 * Are you Earthseed? Do you believe? Belief will not save you. Only actions Guided and shaped By belief and knowledge Will save you. Belief Initiates and guides action— Or it does nothing.
 * Chapter 20 (p. 382)

 * Jarrett would be easier to take if he cared half as much about children’s bodies and minds as he pretends to care about their souls.
 * Chapter 20 (p. 391)

 * We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way things always have been.
 * Chapter 20 (p. 392)

 * “I’m not a demagogue.” “That’s too bad. That leaves the field to people who are demagogues—to the Jarrets of the world. And there have always been Jarrets. Probably there always will be.”
 * Chapter 20 (p. 395)

 * No one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people’s children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn’t hurt them!
 * Chapter 20 (p. 404)

 * I’m literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.
 * Chapter 20 (p. 405)

 * We’ve also been laughed at, argued with, booed, and threatened with hellfire—or gunfire. But Jarret’s kind of religion and Jarret himself are getting less and less popular these days. Both, it seems, are bad for business, bad for the U. S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they’ve just made others very angry.
 * Chapter 21 (p. 430)

 * How completely, how thoroughly he has stolen my child. I have never even tried to forgive him.
 * Epilogue (p. 446)

Fledgling (2005)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback edition published by Grand Central Publishing ISBN 978-0-446-69616-6

 * “It’s a crucifix,” Wright told me when I showed it to him. “It must have been worn by one of the people who lived here. Or maybe the arsonist lost it.” He gave a humorless smile. “You never know who’s liable to turn out to be religious.”
 * Chapter 7 (p. 59)

 * “He had guns,” Celia said. “Iosif didn’t like guns, but Stefan did.” It hadn’t helped him survive.
 * Chapter 10 (p. 104)

 * My ignorance wasn’t just annoying. It was dangerous.
 * Chapter 13 (p. 126)

 * That is the most unromantic declaration of love I’ve ever heard. Or is that what you’re saying? Do you love me, Shori, or do I just taste good?
 * Chapter 14 (p. 139)

 * We can see that our Councils aren’t games like the tribunals humans have. The work of a Council of Judgment is to learn the truth and then decide what to do about it within our law. It isn’t about following laws so strictly that the guilty go unpunished or the innocent are made to suffer. It isn’t about protecting everyone’s rights. It’s about finding the truth, period, and then deciding what to do about it.
 * Chapter 21 (p. 220)

Interview with Democracy Now (2005)

 * Most vampires, I’ve discovered, are men, for some reason. I guess it’s because Dracula, people are kind of feeding off that.

 * I fell into writing it because I saw a bad movie, a movie called Devil Girl from Mars, and went into competition with it. But I think I stayed with it because it was so wide open. It gave me the chance to comment on every aspect of humanity. People tend to think of science fiction as, oh, Star Wars or Star Trek. And the truth is, there are no closed doors, and there are no required formulas. You can go anywhere with it.

 * I wrote the two Parable books back in the '90s. And they are books about, as I said, what happens because we don't trouble to correct some of the problems that we’re brewing for ourselves right now. Global warming is one of those problems. And I was aware of it back in the ’80s. I was reading books about it. And a lot of people were seeing it as politics, as something very iffy, as something they could ignore because nothing was going to come of it tomorrow. That and the fact that I think I was paying a lot of attention to education because a lot of my friends were teachers, and the politics of education was getting scarier, it seemed to me. We were getting to that point where we were thinking more about the building of prisons than of schools and libraries. And I remember while I was working on the novels, my hometown, Pasadena, had a bond issue that they passed to aid libraries, and I was so happy that it passed, because so often these things don’t. And they had closed a lot of branch libraries and were able to reopen them. So, not everybody was going in the wrong direction, but a lot of the country still was. And what I wanted to write was a novel of someone who was coming up with solutions of a sort.

Quotes about Octavia Butler

 * The Prophet Octavia Butler.
 * Elizabeth Acevedo Interview (2021)

 * “She was an utter inspiration,” said Steven Barnes, a longtime friend and science fiction author who was the first African American to write one of the novels based on “Star Wars.” “I don’t know what would have happened to me had I not had her as an example.” Mystery writer Walter Mosley said Butler expanded the genre “by writing a kind of fiction that African American women around the country could read and understand both technically and emotionally.... She wasn’t writing romance or feel-good novels, she was writing very difficult, brilliant work.” “For an African American woman to somehow define herself as a science fiction writer and to realize that dream is an extraordinary thing,” he said in an interview Monday. “In black speculative fiction, we are a tiny family and Octavia Butler was our matriarch,” writer Tananarive Due said. “So we just lost our mother, our grandmother.”
 * In article (2006)

 * Seattle-based science fiction writer Greg Bear said. "For being a black female growing up in Los Angeles in the '60s, she was attracted to science fiction for the same reasons I was: It liberated her. She had a far-ranging imagination, and she was a treasure in our community."
 * In article (2006)

 * For too long, the voices and visions for our future have been provided, for the most part, by and from a culturally European (if not Eurocentric) perspective. However, there is change afoot. The works of Octavia E. Butler are becoming mainstream, and names like Nnedi Okorafor and Lesley Nneka Arimah are bringing much needed flavor to the narratives that help shape our future.
 * LeVar Burton Forward to New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color edited by Nisi Shawl (2019)

 * Imagination is a muscle that, for many of us, will atrophy if we don't use it, especially under the pressure of constant fear. Fear and imagination often can't be in the same room. So, one of the things I think to strengthen that muscle is, first of all, reading. Reading visionary fiction, reading visionary texts. I often recommend Octavia Butler to people because it's reading things that are hard.
 * Adrienne Maree Brown in Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua (2023)

 * Sister, we got cities burning, you know, they were telling her. And how dare she, you know, sort of retreat into this world. But actually, she was showing us an even bigger world, you know, something that we couldn't even wrap our minds around. And that's important.
 * Tananarive Due, in article (2006)

 * As Katrina was happening, in the aftermath of Katrina, a lot of people were talking about Octavia Butler and how the Parable series made them think about that.
 * Amy Goodman 2005 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler

 * Donna Haraway and Amanda Boulter praise Butler's novels for the way that they consistently "interrogate reproductive, linguistic, and nuclear politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-century race and gender,"
 * 1997 article in Conversations with Octavia Butler

 * Octavia Butler told me one of the failures of sci-fi /fantasy was its inability to imagine the alien other as anything different from a human form "with a mask on." I rate sci-fi on that basis to this day. Yes. I knew her. Yes. She was exceptional.
 * Karla F.C. Holloway on Twitter

 * Butler: I wish more people would talk about the ways in which she messes with normative sexualities, and I miss her very much, and I don't care that that's really two sentences masquerading as one.
 * 2012 interview included in Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson edited by Isiah Lavender III

 * We titled this collection in honor of Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Butler explored the intersections of identity and imagination, the gray areas of race, class, gender, sexuality, love, militarism, inequality, oppression, resistance, and most important-hope. Her work has taught us so much about the principles of visionary fiction, inspiring us. The title plays on Butler's three novel collection, Lilith's Brood, which is about adaptation as a necessity for survival. Changes will occur that we cannot even begin to imagine, and the next generation will be both utterly familiar and wholly alien to their parents. We believe this is what it means to carry on Butler's legacy of writing visionary fiction.
 * Walidah Imarisha Introduction to Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015)

 * At a retreat for women writers in 1988, Octavia E. Butler said that she never wanted the title of being the solitary Black female sci-fi writer. She wanted to be one of many Black female sci-fi writers. She wanted to be one of thousands of folks writing themselves into the present and into the future. We believe in that right Butler claimed for each of us-the right to dream as ourselves, individually and collectively. But we also think it is a responsibility she handed down: are we brave enough to imagine beyond the boundaries of "the real" and then do the hard work of sculpting reality from our dreams?
 * Walidah Imarisha Introduction to Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015)

 * (The book that...shaped my worldview:) Dawn by Octavia E. Butler.
 * N.K. Jemisin interview (2022)

 * Kindred is her most overtly political novel, the Patternmaster series the most popular. Survivor brilliantly blends genre SF with issues of colonialism and racism.
 * China Mieville 50 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read

 * In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. cautioned us about adding "deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars." He wrote that darkness cannot drive out darkness, that hate cannot drive out hate, and he reminded us that only love can do that. Thirty years later, Octavia E. Butler wrote in her novel Parable of the Sower that our "destiny is to take root among the stars." The activist and the artist seem at first to have been engaged in markedly different lifework, yet they embraced a shared dream for the future. Their work is linked by faith and a fusion of spiritual teachings and social consciousness, a futuristic social gospel. In its essence, social justice work, which King embodied and Butler expressed so skillfully in her novels and stories, is about love-a love that has the best hopes and wishes for humanity at heart.
 * Sheree Thomas Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015)

Adrienne Maree Brown, Interview with Democracy Now (2021)

 * Walidah Imarisha and I, when we did Octavia’s Brood, Walidah called it “visionary fiction,” to look ahead at the future and then write ourselves in. And that’s what Octavia was doing with all of her work.

 * she was a worker, so she was a laborer. She was always working. And her writing process would be waking up at 3:00 in the morning, because she needed to do it. She had what she called “positive obsession,” a positive obsession with moving these stories out.

 * so much has changed there because of the work of Octavia, because of the work of Nnedi Okorafor, because of the work of Tananarive Due.

 * one of the things that was so powerful to me when I first picked up Octavia is that she wrote these strong Black feminine characters, these protagonists, who now you might look back and see the nonbinary, see the queerness, see other things in them, but at the time, she was writing these characters, and it was like, “Oh, there’s young Black women, and they’re leading.”

 * she wrote about Black women and about Black feminism, about Black futures, but she wrote in a way that appealed to all human beings. And I think that that, to me, is one of the essences of feminism. It’s like, we’re not saying we’re better than or beyond. We’re saying we are right here, equal to anyone else and able to lead as much as anyone else. So, she understood that. She wrote it beautifully.

title: Octavia Butler


text:
Blur (band)

Blur are an English rock band, formed in London in 1988. The group consists of singer/keyboardist Damon Albarn, guitarist/singer Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree.

 * So what's the worth In all of this If the child in your head If the child is dead
 * "Sing"

From Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993)
 * Advertisements are here for rapid persuasion If you stare too long you lose your appetite
 * "Advert"

 * You need a holiday, somewhere in the sun with all the people who are waiting, there never seems to be one say something, say something else
 * "Advert"

 * I'll forget to breathe someday, I never stopped to think why
 * "Resigned"

 * Jim stops and gets out the car goes to a house in Emperor's Gate goes through the door and to his room and then he puts the TV on turns it off and makes some tea says "Modern life well it's rubbish I'm holding on for tomorrow"
 * "For Tomorrow"

From Parklife (1994)
 * Girls Who Are Boys Who Like Boys To Be Girls Who Do Boys Like They're Girls Who Do Girls Like They're Boys Always Should Be Someone You Really Love
 * "Girls and Boys"

 * End of a century, ooohhhh, it's nothing special
 * "End of a Century"

 * Confidence is a preference for the 'abitual voyeur of wha' is known as (Parklife!)
 * "Parklife"

 * Bank holiday comes six times a year, days of enjoyment to which everybody cheers! Bank holiday comes (with) a six pack of beer then it's back to work A. G. AIN
 * "Bank Holiday"

 * This is a low, but it won't hurt you when you're alone it will be there with you finding ways to stay so low
 * "This is a Low"

From The Great Escape (1995)
 * He thinks his educated airs those family shares Will protect him, that you will respect him He moves in circles of friends who just pretend that they like him He does the same to them and when you put it all together There's the model of a charmless man
 * "Charmless Man"

 * It really, really, really could happen Yes, it really, really, really could happen When the days they seem to fall through you, well just let them go
 * "The Universal"

From Blur (1997)
 * And when she lets me slip away She turns me on all my violence is gone
 * "Beetlebum"

 * In this town cellular phones are hot with teens, and in this town we all go to terminal pubs, it helps us sweat out those angry bits of life, from this town the English army grinds its teeth into glass
 * "Essex Dogs"

From 13 (1999)
 * Tender is the day, the demons go away
 * "Tender"

 * Space is the place
 * "Bugman"

 * So give me coffee and TV, history I've seen so much I'm going blind and I'm brain-dead virtually sociability, is hard enough for me take me away from this big bad world and agree to marry me we can start over again
 * "Coffee & TV"

From Think Tank (2003)
 * I ain't got nothing to be scared of
 * "Ambulance"

 * Brothers and sisters Rebuild your lives We're all drug takers Give us something tonight
 * "Brothers and Sisters"

 * Waiting, I got no town to hide in The country's got a hold of my soul TV's dead and there ain't no war in my head And you seem very beautiful to me
 * "Good Song"

 * And you've been so busy lately That you haven't found the time To open up your mind And watch the world spinning gently out of time.
 * "Out of Time"

 * Feel the sunshine on your face It's in a computer now. Gone are the future, way out in space.
 * "Out of Time"

 * Caravan is lost In the sun and the dust No-one loves you When you are lost Yeah I've been a clown Trying to pull my whole world down I thought I was strong But you are the one And when it comes, you'll feel the weight of it The weight of it And the day and you'll get away from it, Away from it
 * "Caravan"

 * Y'know yer get down now, and yer look at the wall And what does the wall say to yer? I ain't a mirror, f#$k off! It's true though innit? Think about it Don't stall man I got 'ouses ter build
 * "Me, White Noise"

 * And then you move move move move, and you push push push push, and you trip over yourself and you think to yourself, why am I here? I'm here because I got no fucking choice!
 * "Me, White Noise"

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Blur (band)


text:
User:BlankVerse/ToDo

Articles to create

 * Los Angeles (or Los Angeles, California?)
 * California

Articles to add quotes to

 * Poets
 * Matsuo Bashō
 * Allen Ginsberg
 * Ezra Pound

 * Science fiction authors
 * Isaac Asimov

 * Musicians
 * Jazz
 * Charles Mingus
 * Miles Davis
 * Duke Ellington

 * Other
 * Tom Waits

title: User:BlankVerse/ToDo


text:
Scientology

Scientology is a body of beliefs and related practices created by L. Ron Hubbard in 1952 as a successor to his earlier self-help system, Dianetics Hubbard characterized Scientology as a religion, and it is legally recognized as such in the United States Even so, Scientology has been widely criticized as a cult that financially defrauds and abuses its members. The Church of Scientology has also been accused of harassing its critics, and has consistently used litigation against them.

Quotes

 * In alphabetical order by author or source.

 * The one thing that was really cool about L. Ron Hubbard was that he really got the concept that if people united, and not in some airy-fairy way, but if they united and they put their, you know, muscle and brawn together and they worked really hard, you could create a better civilization.
 * Kirstie Alley — quoted in

 * They [the Guardian's Office] were L. Ron Hubbard’s intelligence agents. That was their purpose; and indeed an intelligence specialist in the U.S. has said that they were as effective as the CIA.
 * Jon Atack — quoted in

 * The prospect of a new global order is also central to many variants of the Human Potential and New Age movements and Scientology. All these very different kinds of NRM nevertheless share a conviction that human beings have, perhaps for the first time, come into possession of the knowledge required to free them from traditional structures of thought and action.

 * But of course their doctrine states that the purpose of a suit is to harass, not to win, so from that perspective they hurt us all. They've had a real chilling effect on journalism, both before and after my piece.
 * Richard Behar — interview in

 * Scientology promotes not watching the news. It keeps you inside a Truman Show where you're totally unaware of things. It's like your own thinking gets shut down and you get used to not considering anything that might be critical of Scientology.
 * Tory Christman —

 * There is more evil in one second of the history of the Roman Catholic Church than there is in the entire lifetime of Scientology.
 * Alexander Cockburn, "In Depth with Alexander Cockburn", C-SPAN, 1 April 2007.

 * And this really directly affects my relationship with people, with individuals around me, with my loved ones, and also with audiences.
 * Chick Corea — quoted in

 * You can't drive past an accident, because as a Scientologist you are the only one who can help.
 * Tom Cruise — quoted in

 * The secret feeling that you’re basically superior to your fellow man is probably more human than anything, except the related doubt that you’re superior to anyone. Racism is based on the need to believe in superiority, and one of the basic factors underlying many neuroses is the doubt of even equality. L. Ron Hubbard has capitalized on this situation in a book—printed by Hermitage House—Dianetics, available to all at $4.00 per copy. It isn’t at all surprising that the book has been a best seller, since it gives the credulous reason to believe that he can really be the superman he always felt he was. It also purports to be a science, which is the current catch-word to replace the older black-magic in the popular mind. The fact that it lacks a fundamental scientific basis has little to do with the average, untrained reader’s idea that he is being scientific in trying out the “experiments”—totally without controls or any basis of objective evaluation—in the book.
 * Lester del Rey, Superman—C.O.D. in Marvel Science Stories (May 1951), p. 116

 * People mistake L. Ron Hubbard and his Scientology. They see the apparency, and not the actuality. By design. Scientology does not work as stated; but as intended. As intended by its creator L Ron Hubbard. To keep the Doorway open. To remain in the realm of the Great Beast. To feed the hunger of the Will. His Will. When he emptied the purse of man and the heart of women; it seeks onward and outward. Appetite. Forever appetite. Scientology is the snare. The passion flower. the Cloak of Lights. The glow of power. A power always wanting. Always needing. The Will never satisfied.
 * Ron DeWolfe eldest son of Hubbard (born L. Ron Hubbard, Jr.) (1980), The Telling of Me, by Me (1981)

 * The trade secrets that they're trying to protect, all that science fiction space opera stuff at the end of the road, it's already on the hard load--hard drives of millions of people. In other words, the cat's out of the bag. So anybody that cares to investigate this organization are just a few keystrokes away from finding the truth-- and it's out there.
 * Mark Ebner — quoted in

 * The Celebrity Centre is just like, you know, the stable datum of like, growth and sanity, and growing as an artist, and, um, it's just like I'm always safe when I come here.
 * Jenna Elfman — quoted in

 * I got a lot of benefit from auditing. It was the fastest and deepest way to handle situations that I had yet encountered. I immediately wanted to learn to do it. … With Scientology, I was able to characterize the Mind more accurately, and to cease justifying it. This greatly clarified what I was doing. … After my experience with Scientology, I saw what it means to see the Mind as a machine. I can now operate my Mind accordingly, with exactitude. I can do the familiar mind over matter experiments - the control of pain and bleeding, telepathy, those things.
 * Werner Erhard (former Scientologist), Interview with William Warren Bartley, cited in

 * I felt great and I got rid of some stuff that I didn't realize that I was dragging around. And I said, "Whoa, I think I've become a Scientologist."
 * Isaac Hayes — quoted in

 * Scientology means 'scio', knowing in the fullest sense of the word and 'logos', study. In itself the word means 'knowing how to know'.Scientology is a 'route', a way, rather than a dissertation or assertive body of knowledge. Through its drills and studies one may find the truth for himself. The technology is therefore not expounded as something to believe, but something to 'do'.
 * L. Ron Hubbard, Basic Dictionary of Dianetics and Scientology, Bridge Publications, Inc., p. 34.

 * The Aetherius Society is technically a “UFO religion,” in that it depends upon a belief in extraterrestrial entities operating UFOs. There are many such religions, the largest of which is Scientology.

 * Why Scientology is a religion? Religion is about the spirit, and Scientology deals with the spirit. We are in the tradition of the much older religions -- Buddhism, Hinduism -- helping the person as a spiritual being improve himself. That is what religion is about. That is why this is a religion. It doesn't fall into any other field.
 * David Miscavige — interview in

 * But we’re friends with Penn Jillette, and Showtime wouldn’t let him do an episode of Bullshit! on Scientology..And hearing other people say, "You can’t do that,"—you can only say "You can’t do that" so many times to Matt and me before we’re gonna do it..So we realized we had to do it, and now that we’ve done it, now it’s like we’ve sort of opened the floodgates. People will be less scared.
 * Trey Parker — quoted in

 * Scientology is thus one of several groups that form part of the Human Potential Movement (HPM) - an umbrella term for organization that offer enhanced quality of life.

 * What was most incredible about being with him [L. Ron Hubbard] was that he made you feel that you were important..He didn't in any way promote himself or his own self-importance. He was very, very loving and had the widest range of knowledge and experience that you could possibly imagine -- he'd studied everything.
 * Mike Rinder — quoted in

 * Many of the new religions attract individuals by the promise of peace of mind, spiritual well-being, gratifying experiences, and material success. In doing so they stress their concern for the individual and highlight one's personal worth and self-development. This is especially so in human growth movements such as Scientology.

 * I took a couple of courses. One of them was in communication, and I learned some things about communication that really got my act going...They have a lot of very good technology. That’s what really appealed to me about it. It’s not faith-based. It’s all technology. And I’m obsessed with technology.
 * Jerry Seinfeld (former Scientologist), Interview in

 * I knew Ron Hubbard before he ever started Scientology. I was in a writing group with him in Greenwich Village and he kept saying, "You know, the only way to make any money, you can't do it with pulp writing, you got to, you start a religion." And nobody took him very seriously.
 * Lyle Stuart — quoted in

 * Now, to those who are for dianetics: ITEM: Only a fool will accept the whole because one or two of its parts acceptable. To observe some of the remarkable effects of dianetic therapy and thereby conclude, without evidence, that all Hubbard’s theories are correct, is about as intelligent as trying to chew into a peach-tree because you found the peaches good. ITEM: There is a deplorable proclivity in the human animal to get faddistic about certain ideas. Faith is a beautiful thing. So are forest fires, and the color of gangrene. I think faith—especially capital-F Faith—is more dangerous and more disgusting than either. It is a substitute for thought. Dianetics, for all its effectiveness, is not a panacea, and Ron Hubbard is not the Messiah. If you are feeling either of these two things, go take a cold shower.
 * Theodore Sturgeon, How to Avoid a Hole in the Head in Marvel Science Stories (May 1951), p. 115

 * A new mediation is necessary, one which was already in existence and practice in the time of Esotericism and Theosophy but has since been lost. “Secular” and “religious” are not categories in contrast to each other: they must go together. Scientology – in my opinion - through its new “physical” and “spiritual” principles signals this new direction that religions and humanity as a whole, perhaps, ought to follow.

 * Almost all the information in the show is taken from their own literature..We thought that the best way to satirize the Church of Scientology was to let the Church speak for itself.
 * Alex Timbers — quoted in

 * This is how they suck you in, they offer these innocuous-seeming self-improvement courses for 40 bucks, then they start to interest you in Dianetic auditing..It's a kind of crack psychotherapy.
 * David S. Touretzky — quoted in

 * I'm part of a, of a frontier in a way, you know, that very few people ever get to be part of. Like a pioneer in many, in many ways, and I've, I've seen my efforts come to fruition.
 * John Travolta — quoted in

 * The cutting edge on such battles is often the Church of Scientology..They have very well honed procedures and tactics to remove information that they find objectionable.
 * Jonathan Zittrain — quoted in

title: Scientology


text:
User talk:69.118.82.43

~ Kalki 18:40, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

title: User talk:69.118.82.43


text:
Clarence Day

Clarence Shepherd Day, Jr. (18 November 1874 – 28 December 1935) was an American author and humorist. Day's most famous work is the autobiographical Life with Father (1935), which detailed humorous episodes in his family's life, centering on his dominating father, during the 1890s in New York City.

Quotes

 * The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead. And even the books that do not last long, penetrate their own times at least, sailing farther than Ulysses even dreamed of, like ships on the seas. It is the author’s part to call into being their cargoes and passengers,—living thoughts and rich bales of study and jeweled ideas. And as for the publishers, it is they who build the fleet, plan the voyage, and sail on, facing wreck, till they find every possible harbor that will value their burden.
 * The Story of the Yale University Press Told by a Friend (1920), pp. 7–8.

 * The rich are not really a bad lot. We must not judge by appearances. If it weren't for their money they would be indistinguishable from the rest of us. But money brings out their weaknesses, naturally. Would it not bring out ours? A moderate addiction to money may not always be hurtful; but when taken in excess it is nearly always bad for the health, it limits one's chance of indulging in nice simple pleasures, and in many cases it lowers the whole moral tone. The rich admit this — of each other; but what can they do? Once a man has begun to accumulate money, it is unnatural to stop. He actually gets in a state where he wants more and more. This may seem incomprehensible to those who have never suffered from affluence, and yet they would feel the same way, in a millionaire's place. A man begins by thinking that he can have money without being its victim. He will admit that other men addicted to wealth find it hard to be moderate, but he always is convinced that he is different and has more self-control. But the growth of an appetite is determined by nature, not men, and this is as true of getting money as of anything else. As soon as a man is used to a certain amount, no matter how large, his ideas of what is suitable expand. That is the way men are made.
 * ""Annual Report of the League for Improving the Lives of the Rich" in The Crow's Nest (1921)

 * When eras die, their legacies are left to strange police. Professors in New England guard The glory that was Greece.
 * Thoughts without words (1928), p. 113

 * You can't sweep other people off their feet, if you can't be swept off your own.
 * After All (1936), p. 224

 * Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.
 * As quoted in The International Thesaurus of Quotations (1970) edited by Rhoda Thomas Tripp

Misattributed

 * We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.
 * Alexander Hamilton, as quoted in The Home Book of Quotations, Classical and Modern (1958)

title: Clarence Day


text:
Cyrano de Bergerac

Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (6 March 1619 – 28 July 1655) was a French dramatist and soldier, most widely remembered because of the fictional romantic play based upon his life by Edmond Rostand.

The Other World (1657)

 * L'autre monde ou Les états et empires de la lune (The Other World or The states and empires of the moon), often referred to as Voyage dans la lune (Voyage to the Moon). Full text online : The Other World: Society and Government of the Moon (2003) as translated and annotated by Donald Webb

 * "I think the Moon is a world like this one, and the Earth is its moon."  My friends greeted this with a burst of laughter. "And maybe," I told them, "someone on the Moon is even now making fun of someone else who says that our globe is a world."

 * I had scarcely entered the room when I saw on my table an open book I had not put there. It was the works of Cardano. I did not intend to read it, but my gaze fell as though compelled on a story told by that philosopher. He writes that he was studying one night by candlelight when he saw two tall old men come in through the closed doors of his room. He asked them many questions, and they finally told him they were from the Moon; whereupon they disappeared. I was so surprised, both by the book that had put itself on my table and by the page it was open to, that I took this chain of events for an inspiration from God, who was urging me to tell people that the Moon is a world.

 * I established myself in a fairly remote country house and entertained my imagination with various means of transport. Here is how I betook myself to heaven. I attached to myself a number of bottles of dew, and the heat of the sun, which attracted it, drew me so high that I finally emerged above the highest clouds. But the sun's attraction of the dew drew me upwards so rapidly that instead of approaching the Moon, as I intended, I seemed to be farther from it than when I started. I broke open some of the bottles and felt my weight overcome the attraction and bring me back towards the earth.

 * With my equipment, I walked toward a thatched cottage from which I saw smoke emerging. I was scarcely within pistol-shot range when I was surrounded by a large number of savages. They were very surprised to meet me, because I think I was the first they had seen dressed in bottles. And, to confound even more all the interpretations they might have given to this attire, I walked almost without touching the ground. They could not know that any jostling of my body raised me off the ground because the dew was heated by the noonday sun and that more bottles of dew might have taken me upwards into the air.

 * I was presented to Monsieur de Montmagny, the viceroy. He asked my nationality, name, and rank. When I had satisfied him by recounting the success of my voyage, which he either believed or pretended to, he kindly lent me a room in his apartment. I was happy to meet a man capable of enlightened opinions, one who was not surprised when I told him that the earth must have turned beneath me while I was aloft. Having begun my ascent two leagues from Paris, I had come down in almost a straight line to Canada.

 * In the evening, as I was going to bed, I saw him come into my room. "I would not have come," he told me, "and interrupt your rest unless I believed that someone who could travel nine hundred leagues in half a day could have done so without getting tired. You don't know of the fine argument I've been having about you with our Jesuit priests?" he added. "They insist you are a magician. The best you can hope for from them is to pass only for an impostor."

 * Most men judge only by their senses and let themselves be persuaded by what they see. Just as the man whose boat sails from shore to shore thinks he is stationary and that the shore moves, men turn with the earth under the sky and have believed that the sky was turning above them. On top of that, insufferable vanity has convinced humans that nature has been made only for them, as though the sun, a huge body four hundred and thirty-four times as large as the earth, had been lit only to ripen our crab apples and cabbages. I am not one to give in to the insolence of those brutes. I think the planets are worlds revolving around the sun and that the fixed stars are also suns that have planets revolving around them. We can't see those worlds from here because they are so small and because the light they reflect cannot reach us. How can one honestly think that such spacious globes are only large, deserted fields? And that our world was made to lord it over all of them just because a dozen or so vain wretches like us happen to be crawling around on it? Do people really think that because the sun gives us light every day and year, it was made only to keep us from bumping into walls? No, no, this visible god gives light to man by accident, as a king's torch accidentally shines upon a working man or burglar passing in the street."

 * As God has made the soul immortal, he has made the universe infinite, if it is true that eternity is nothing other than unlimited duration and infinity is space without limits. Suppose the universe were not infinite: God himself would be finite, because he could not be where there is nothing, and he could not increase the size of the universe without adding to his own size and come to be where he had not been before.

 * After a while the press of business in the province put an end to our philosophizing, and I returned with increased determination to my plans to fly to the Moon.

 * I constructed a machine that I imagined was capable of taking me as high as I wanted to go. I launched myself into the air from the edge of a cliff. But I had miscalculated, and I crashed into the valley below. I returned to my room, quite rumpled but not discouraged. I took some beef marrow and slathered it all over my body, which was bruised from head to toe. I fortified my courage with a bottle of cordial and went back for my machine.

 * I ran and grabbed the arm of the soldier who was lighting the fire. I tore the fuse away from him and, furious, threw myself into my machine to break down the contraption surrounding it. But I was too late. Hardly had I stepped inside when I found myself propelled into the clouds. I was terrified, but my mind was not too upset for me to remember all that happened at that moment. I can tell you, then, that the fire burned out a bank of rockets (which had been linked together in rows of six with a hook at the edge of each set of half-dozen). Another stage ignited, then another, so that the danger in the gunpowder was left behind as it burned. When the material was used up, the scaffolding was gone. I was thinking that all I had left to do was ram my head against some mountain when I felt (without moving in the slightest) that I was still going up. My machine separated from me, and I saw it fall back to earth.

 * After falling for a very long time, as I surmise after the fact (I was falling so fast that I must have lost track), all I can remember is that I found myself under a tree. I was entangled in three or four rather large branches I had broken in my fall. An apple had squashed against my face and made it all wet with its juice. Fortunately, as you will soon learn, this place was the Garden of Eden, and the tree I had fallen into was none other than the Tree of Life. You would be quite right to think I would have been killed a thousand times over but for this miraculous good fortune.

 * The angel had told me in my dream that if I wanted to acquire the perfect knowledge I desired, I would have to go to the Moon. There I would find Adam's paradise and the Tree of Knowledge. As soon as I had tasted its fruit, my mind would be enlightened with all the truths a person could know. That is the voyage for which I built my chariot. Finally, I climbed aboard and, when I was securely settled on the seat, I tossed the magnetic ball high into the air. The chariot I had built was more massive in the middle than at the ends; it was perfectly balanced because the middle rose faster than the extremities. When I had risen to the point that the magnet was drawing me to, I seized the magnetic ball and tossed it into the air again.
 * Elijah to Cyrano

 * To tell the truth, the chariot was an astonishing sight to behold, because I had polished the steel of my flying house so carefully that it reflected the sunlight on all sides. It was so bright and dazzling that I thought, myself, that I had been carried away in a chariot of fire.
 * Elijah to Cyrano

 * The apple of knowledge is not far from here. As soon as you've eaten it, you'll know as much as I do. But be careful not to make any mistakes: most of the apples hanging from that tree are enveloped in a thick skin. If you taste it, you will be brought low, beneath man; the inner part of the fruit will bring you up to the level of an angel.
 * Angel to Elijah

 * You are now bearing the punishment for the shortcomings of your world. Here, as in your world, there are benighted people who cannot tolerate thinking about things they are not accustomed to. But you realize that you are being treated here the same as there. If someone from this world came to yours with the audacity to call himself a man, your learned men would stifle him for being a monster or a monkey possessed by the Devil.
 * Sun-being (démon; spirit) to Cyrano

 * The people of your world became so stupid and rude that my companions and I no longer enjoyed teaching them. You must surely have heard of us: we were called oracles, nymphs, spirits, fairies, household gods, lemures, larvas, lamias, sprites, water-nymphs, incubi, shades, spirits of the dead, specters and ghosts.
 * Sun-being to Cyrano

 * I am not from your world or this one; I was born on the Sun. Sometimes our world becomes overcrowded because our people live so long. Our people are almost free of wars and illness, and sometimes our government officials send colonies to neighboring worlds.
 * Sun-being to Cyrano

 * To make myself visible as I am now, when I sense that the cadaver that I occupy is almost worn out or that the organs are no longer working very well, I breathe myself into a young body that has just died.
 * Sun-being to Cyrano

 * Even though they, themselves, were material beings, they could show themselves to us only by taking on bodies that our senses were able to perceive.

 * You imagine that what you can't understand is either spiritual or does not exist. The conclusion is quite wrong; rather there are obviously a million things in the universe that we would need a million quite different organs to understand. For example, I perceive by my senses what makes a magnet point north, what makes tides rise and fall, and what becomes of an animal after death. Your people are not proportioned to perceive such miracles, just as someone blind from birth cannot imagine the beauty of a landscape, the colors of a painting or the shadings of an iris. He will imagine them as something palpable, edible, audible or olfactory. Likewise, if I were to explain to you what I perceive by the senses you do not have, you would interpret it as something that could be heard, seen, touched, smelled or tasted; but it is not like that.

 * I felt the body I was occupying so weakened that all its organs were shutting down. I asked the way to the hospital, and as soon as I walked in I discovered the body of a young man who had just given up the ghost. I approached the body and pretended I had seen it move. I protested to all the attendants that he wasn't dead and that his illness wasn't even dangerous. Nobody noticed when I adroitly breathed myself into him. My old body immediately dropped dead, and I stood up in this fresh body. Everyone exclaimed that it was a miracle, and I didn't stop to disabuse them.

 * Our host received a piece of paper from my familiar spirit. I asked if he were giving him a check or note to pay the bill. He answered no, that he had settled the account with a poem. "What? A poem?" I asked. "Are innkeepers curious about rhymes?" "It's the local currency," he answered. "The sextain I've just given him will cover our expenses. I wasn't afraid of coming up short. Even if we'd spent a week in luxury, it wouldn't have cost a sonnet, and I have four on me. Along with two epigrams, two odes and an eclogue."

 * One day, my male companion (they took me for the female) told me what had really caused him to wander about the world and finally to leave it for the Moon. He had not been able to find a single country where the imagination was free.

 * How do you think a spade, sword or dagger wounds us? Because the metal is a form of matter in which the particles are closer and more tightly bound together than those of your flesh. The metal forces flesh to yield to strength, just as a galloping squadron penetrates a battle line that is of much greater extent. And why is a piece of hot metal hotter than a piece of burning wood? Because the metal contains more heat in a smaller volume. The particles in the metal are more compact than those in the wood.

 * Do you say it is incomprehensible that there is nothingness in the world and that we are partly composed of nothing? Well, why not? Is not the whole world enveloped by nothingness? Since you concede that point, admit as well that it is just as easy for the world to have nothingness within as without.

 * A man contains all that is needed to make up a tree; likewise, a tree contains all that is needed to make up a man. Thus, finally, all things meet in all things, but we need a Prometheus to distill it.

 * The town was abuzz with talk of the King's animals. We were fed regularly, and the King and Queen quite often enjoyed feeling my abdomen to see if I weren't pregnant; they were extraordinarily eager to have a whole family of little animals like us.

 * I learned to understand their language and to speak it a little. Immediately the news spread throughout the kingdom that two little wild men had been discovered. We were smaller than everybody else because the wilderness had provided us with such bad food. And it was a genetic defect that caused us to have forelimbs that weren't strong enough to support us. This belief gained strength through repetition despite the priests of the country. They opposed it, saying that it was an awful impiety to believe that not only animals but monsters might be of the same species as they.

 * People were soon talking only of my bons mots, and they esteemed my wit so highly that the clergy was forced to publish a decree that forbade anyone to believe I was capable of reason, and it expressly commanded everyone of all ranks to believe — no matter how intelligently I might act — that I was guided by instinct.

 * Even if a king defeats his enemy in battle, that still doesn't settle anything. There are other, less numerous armies of philosophers and scientists, and their contests determine the true triumph or defeat of nations. One scholar is matched with another; one creative mind with another; and one judicious temperament with his counterpart. A victory won on that field counts for three won by force of arms.

 * I could scarcely keep from laughing at this scrupulous manner of waging war. I cited the European example as a much more forceful policy. A monarch is careful not to overlook any advantage for victory. She had some questions about that: "Tell me," she said, "do your princes have no other pretext for war than might makes right?" "Yes," I answered, "the justice of their cause." "Why, then," she continued, "do they not choose to be reconciled by impartial judges? And if it is determined that both sides are in the right, then why not maintain the status quo? Or why not play a game of gin rummy for the town or province they're arguing over? But no, while they cause the death of four million men who are better than they, they stay in their strategy rooms making light of the way the poor fellows are being massacred. But I'm wrong to criticize the valour of your brave men. It's important to die for one's country when it means being the subject of a king who wears a ruffled collar or a pleated one."

 * You praise a man for having killed his enemy by means of an advantage; and by praising him for boldness you praise him for a sin against nature, because boldness leads to destruction.

 * The King's daughter didn't talk to me any more about military matters at the time, because she was afraid of being discovered alone with me early in the morning. The reason was not that immodesty is a crime in that country. On the contrary, any man — except for convicted felons — can ask what he wants of any woman, and any woman can bring suit against a man who refuses her. But the King's daughter didn't dare come to see me publicly because she said the priests had preached at the last sacrifice that women were mainly the ones who were saying I was a man. The priests claimed that women were disguising their execrable desire to mingle with animals and shamelessly commit sins against nature with me. That was why I went a long time without seeing her or any other female.

 * The priests had been told that I had dared to say that the moon was the world I came from and that their world was only a moon. They believed that constituted an adequately just pretext to condemn me to drowning, which was their way of exterminating atheists.

 * The great pontiff took the floor to argue the case against me. I don't remember his harangue, because I was too horrified to understand such a discordant voice, and because he made his speech with a musical instrument so loud it deafened me. He had deliberately chosen a trumpet. The violence of its martial tone was supposed to make the people call for my death and to keep them from thinking rationally, as happens in our armies, where the din of trumpets and drums prevents the soldier from thinking about the importance of his life.

 * O just ones, hear me! You cannot condemn this man, monkey or parrot for saying that the moon is the world he comes from. If he is a man, all men are free. Is he then not free to imagine what he wants, even if he does not come from the moon? Can you force him to have only your visions? Impossible! You may make him say that he believes that the moon is not a world, but still he will not believe it. To believe something, one must imagine that it is more probable than not. Unless you show him what is probable or he realizes it himself, he may tell you that he believes and yet he will not believe.
 * Sun-being to the court

 * A present loses its value when it is given without the choice of the person who receives it. Caesar was given death, and so was Cassius. However, Cassius was indebted to the slave who gave it to him, while Caesar owed nothing to his murderers, because they forced him to take it.

 * According to your religion, is any part of the body more sacred or unholy than another? Why will I commit a sin if I touch myself on the part in the middle and not when I touch my ear or heel? Because it tickles? Then I should not defecate into a pot, because that can't be done without some sort of sensual pleasure. Nor should mystics elevate themselves to the contemplation of God, because they enjoy a great pleasure of imagination. I am indeed astounded at how much the religion of your country is against nature and is jealous of all the pleasures of men. I am surprised that your priests haven't made it a crime to scratch oneself, because one feels a pleasurable pain. And yet I have noticed that far-seeing Nature has made all great, brave and intelligent people favor the delicacies of love: witness Samson, David, Hercules, Caesar, Hannibal and Charlemagne. Did Nature do so in order that they might harvest the organ of that pleasure with a sickle? Alas, Nature even went under a washtub to debauch Diogenes, who was thin, ugly and flea-bitten, and make him compose sighs to Lais with the breath he blew upon carrots. No doubt Nature did so because it was concerned lest there be a shortage of honorable people in the world.

 * Tell me, is the cabbage you mention not as much a creature of God as you? Do you not both have God and potentiality for your father and mother? For all eternity has God not occupied His intellect with the cabbage's birth as well as yours? It also seems that He has necessarily provided more for the birth of the vegetable than for the thinking being... Will anyone say that we are born in the image of the Sovereign Being, while cabbages are not? Even if it were true, we have effaced that resemblance by soiling our soul in the way in which we resembled Him, because there is nothing more contrary to God than sin. If our soul, then, is no longer His image, we still do not resemble Him by our hands, feet, mouth, face and ears any more than the cabbage does by its leaves, flowers, stem, heart or head.

 * I signaled to my host to try to have the philosophers expound on some aspect of their knowledge. As a good friend he immediately rose to the occasion. I won't go into the conversation that accompanied his request, and the difference between the comic and the serious was too slight to translate.

 * I will prove that there are infinite worlds in an infinite world. Imagine the universe as a great animal, and the stars as worlds like other animals inside it. These stars serve in turn as worlds for other organisms, such as ourselves, horses and elephants. We in our turn are worlds for even smaller organisms such as cankers, lice, worms and mites. And they are earths for other, imperceptible beings. Just as we appear to be a huge world to these little organisms, perhaps our flesh, blood and bodily fluids are nothing more than a connected tissue of little animals that move and cause us to move. Even as they let themselves be led blindly by our will, which serves them as a vehicle, they animate us and combine to produce this action we call life.

 * You will say, 'How can chance assemble in one place all the things necessary to produce an oak tree?' My answer is that it would be no miracle if the matter thus arranged had not formed an oak. But it would have been a very great miracle if, once the matter was thus arranged, an oak had not been formed. A few less of some shapes, and it would have been an elm, a poplar, a willow, an elder, heather or moss. A little more of some other shapes and it might have been a sensitive plant, an oyster in its shell, a worm, a fly, a frog, a sparrow, an ape or a man.

 * You are amazed that matter can form a man when matter is all mixed up at random and so many things go into making a person. But do you not realize that before matter forms someone it has also stopped along the way to make a stone, lead, coral, a flower, or a comet because there was too much or too little of it to make a human being? No wonder, then, that an infinite amount of incessantly moving and changing matter makes up the few animals, vegetables and minerals that we see. No wonder, either, that if you throw dice a hundred times, they will all show the same numbers at some point. This movement of matter, then, could not fail to produce something, and whatever it is will always be admired by the unthinking person who does not realize how close it came to not being made.

 * Give thought to life and liberty.

 * When I opened a box, I found inside something made of metal, somewhat like our clocks, full of an endless number of little springs and tiny machines. It was indeed a book, but it was a miraculous one that had no pages or printed letters. It was a book to be read not with eyes but with ears. When anyone wants to read, he winds up the machine with a large number of keys of all kinds. Then he turns the indicator to the chapter he wants to listen to. As though from the mouth of a person or a musical instrument come all the distinct and different sounds that the upper-class Moon-beings use in their language. When I thought about this marvelous way of making books, I was no longer surprised that the young people of that country know more at the age of sixteen or eighteen than the greybeards of our world. They can read as soon as they can talk and are never at a loss for reading material. In their rooms, on walks, in town, during voyages, on foot or on horseback, they can have thirty books in their pockets or hanging on the pommels of their saddles. They need only wind a spring to hear one or more chapters or a whole book, if they wish. Thus you always have with you all the great men, both living and dead, who speak to you in their own voices.

 * We have observed for thirty centuries that a large nose is a sign on the door of our face that says 'Herein dwells a man who is intelligent, prudent, courteous, affable, noble-minded and generous'. A small nose is a cork on the bottle of the opposite vices.

 * I spoke to my young host: "If you would, tell me the meaning of the bronze figure in the shape of shameful parts hanging from the man's belt. I had seen a number of them at court when I was living in a cage, but as I was almost always in the company of the Queen's daughters, I was afraid I might show disrespect to the women and their social status if I brought up such a gross subject of conversation in their presence. "Here, neither females nor males are so ungrateful as to blush at the sight of what has given them being; and virgins are not ashamed to like to see us wear the only thing that goes by that name, as a token of mother nature. "The sash that honors that man carries a medallion in the form of a virile member. It is the sign of a nobleman and distinguishes the noble from the commoner." I admit that this paradox seemed so outlandish that I could not keep from laughing at it. "This custom seems quite extraordinary to me," I said to my young host, "because in our world the mark of nobility is to wear a sword." He replied calmly, "O little man, how insane the nobles of your world must be if they pride themselves on a tool used by executioners, one that is made only to destroy and that is, in the end, the sworn enemy of all that lives. And they hide, on the contrary, a part of the body without which we would not exist, one that is the Prometheus of every animal and tirelessly repairs the weaknesses of nature! How unfortunate a country is where the marks of generation are ignominious and those of annihilation are honorable! And you call that member one of the 'shameful parts', as though anything were more glorious than to give life and anything more infamous than to take it away."

 * All that has sensation and growth — all matter, in short — will pass through man. When that has happened, the great Day of Judgment will come, and that is the end point of the mysteries in the philosophy of the prophets.

 * The most competent physician of our world advises the patient to listen to an ignorant doctor who the patient thinks is very competent rather than to a competent doctor who the patient thinks is ignorant. He reason is that our imagination works for our good health, and as long as it is supplemented by remedies, it is capable of healing us. But the most powerful remedies are too weak when the imagination does not apply them.

 * "I ask you only why you find the belief inconvenient. I'm quite sure you can find no reason. Since it can only be useful, why do you not let yourself be persuaded? If God exists and you don't believe in Him, you will have made a mistake and disobeyed the commandment to believe in Him. If there is no God, you won't be any better off than the rest of us." "Oh yes I will be better off than you," he answered, "because if there is no God, the game is tied. But, on the contrary, if there is one, I can't have offended something I thought did not exist. Sin requires knowing or willing. Don't you see? Even the least wise would not take offense if some uncouth man insulted him as long as the man hadn't intended to, or had mistaken him for someone else, or wine had loosened his tongue. All the more reason then to ask: will God, who is all-imperturbable, get mad at us for not having recognized Him when He, himself, has denied us the means of knowing Him? "But by all you believe, my little animal, if belief in God were so necessary and were of eternal importance to us, would God himself not infuse in everyone enlightenment as bright as the Sun, which hides from no one? Do we pretend that God wants to play hide-and-seek with us, like children calling 'Peekaboo, I see you!'? Does God put on a mask and then take it off? Does He disguise himself to some and reveal himself to others? That would be a God who is either silly or malicious.

 * His ridiculous and diabolical opinions made me shudder. I began to look a little more closely at this person and was amazed to see something frightening in his face that I had not noticed before: his eyes were small and sunken, his skin dark, his mouth big, his chin hairy and his nails black. Oh God, I thought immediately, this miserable creature is condemned already and may even be the Antichrist that people talk about so much in our world.

 * I marveled repeatedly at the providence of God, who had put these naturally impious people in a place where they could not corrupt his beloved ones and had punished them for their pride by leaving them to their own devices. That is why I don't doubt He has put off having the Gospel preached to them: He knows they would abuse it, and their resistance to it would only earn them a harsher punishment in the other world.

Quotes about de Bergerac

 * Cyrano distills the most radical ideas of his time into a potent literary liqueur.
 * Donald Webb in "The Time Traveler from The Other World" (2003) the introduction to his translation of L’Autre Monde ou les états et empires de la lune

 * Voltaire's philosophical tale "Micromégas" is also considered a "classic of early science fiction." It's very well known and easily accessible, and it's easy to read in the original. But in comparison to Cyrano's novel, it is tame.
 * Donald Webb in "The Time Traveler from The Other World" (2003)

 * I suspect that the playwright Edmond Rostand accurately portrays his ability as a swordsman; Cyrano was something of a legend in his own time.
 * Donald Webb in "The Time Traveler from The Other World" (2003)

title: Cyrano de Bergerac