Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [778]

I’ve never seen more squalor, more human remains, more feral dogs than I saw today. I have to write. I have to dump this onto paper. I can’t keep it inside of me. Seeing the dead has never bothered me before, but this… — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 778

Note

A rare direct statement of why the journal exists at all — the diary is revealed as a pressure valve, not a record. The anaphora of “more… more… more” leads into the fragment “but this…”, and the trailing ellipsis does the work the sentence can’t: it refuses to name what makes this death different from the others.