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If everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?

— Octavia Butler Parable of the Sower (1993)

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Pain

More quotes by Octavia Butler

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.

Parable of the Talents (1998)

Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.

Wild Seed (1980)

You tend to resent people you’re afraid of.

Parable of the Sower (1993)

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.

Parable of the Sower (1993)

If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it.

Parable of the Talents (1998)

All Octavia Butler quotes →

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A man who only becomes a husband brings pain to his parents, and a person who only becomes a son brings pain to his wife.

Sanu Sharma

A portion of life, every moment gets torn out of me hurting, and flees away.

Suman Pokhrel

Knowledge by suffering entereth,
And life is perfected by death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poems (1844)

Some of His children must go into the furnace to testify that the Son of God is there with them.

Elizabeth Prentiss The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss (1882)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Octavia Butler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.