Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [715]

“I don’t think many do,” I said. “I don’t think they’d dare let themselves know.” … He looked at me, and I looked back. I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake. He’s lived with it longer. I wonder how. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 715

Note

The dialogue exchange is the hinge, but the passage earns its keep in the interior note after it: denial described as work people actively do to themselves (“dare let themselves know”), and the daughter measuring herself against her father’s endurance in one unanswerable question. The held gaze supplies the silence the rest of the paragraph thinks into.