Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.
It shouldn’t be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction.
But we can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our forethought, with or without our intent.
Do you think our world is coming to an end?” Dad asked, and with no warning at all, I almost started crying. I had all I could do to hold it back. What I thought was, “No, I think your world is coming to an end, and maybe you with it.
Grief was grief, she thought. It was pain and loss and despair – an abrupt end where there should have been a continuing.
Human beings are good at creating hells for themselves, even out of richness.
I sat where I was, more depressed than ever, hating the whole hopeless, stupid business and wondering whether the human species would ever grow up enough to learn to communicate without using fists of one kind or another.
I wanted to disappear. Instead, I grew to be six feet tall. Boys in particular seemed to assume that I had done this growing deliberately and that I should be ridiculed for it as often as possible.
Just struggling with my own perversity.
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice. Forget talent. If you have it, fine. Use it. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter. As habit is more dependable than inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than talent.
I would like to give them a grove of oak trees, I said. Trees are better than stone- life commemorating life.
Earth is a big place. Even if parts of it are uninhabitable, it’s still a damn big place.
We dull your natural fear of strangers and of difference. We keep you from injuring or killing us or yourselves.
The powerful imaginative impulse that produced Kindred had its first test runs in the escapist fantasies of a child who needed to find or invent alternative realties. By temperament and by virtue of her strict Baptist upbringing, Butler was reclusive; imaginary worlds solaced her against the pinched rewards of the actual world, and books took the place of friends.
My memory of my aunt and uncle told me that even people who loved me could demand more of me than I could give – and expect their demands to be met simply because I owed them.
Then, finally, true success. Isaac.
Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe.
Sometimes people say I look grim or angry. Better to have them think that than know the truth. Better to have them think anything than let them know just how easy it is to hurt me.
You need other people to let you know whether you’re communicating what you think you are and whether you’re doing it in ways that are not only accessible and entertaining, but as compelling as you can make them.
I saw a woman die in childbirth once,” he said. I nodded. “I never saw it, but I kept hearing about it happening. It was pretty common back then, I guess. Poor medical care or none at all.” “No, medical care had nothing to do with the case I saw. This woman’s master strung her up by her wrists and beat her until the baby came out of her – dropped onto the ground.
We couldn’t survive as a people if we were always confined to one ship or one world.