Home > Author > Octavia E. Butler
21 " 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. "
― Octavia E. Butler , Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)
22 " If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do. "
― Octavia E. Butler
23 " There is no endTo what a living worldWill demand of you. "
24 " My brother Keith begged to go with us as usual. He'll turn thirteen in a few days - August 14 - and the thought of waiting two more years until he's 15 must seem impossible to him. I understand. Waiting is terrible. Waiting to be older is worse than other kinds of waiting because there's nothing you can do to make it happen faster. "
25 " I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. "
― Octavia E. Butler , Kindred
26 " My relative examined you, observed a few of your normal body cells, compared them with what it had learned from other humans most like you, and said that you had not only a cancer, but a talent for cancer. "
27 " I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining. "
28 " Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about. "
29 " Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain. "
― Octavia E. Butler , Imago (Xenogenesis, #3)
30 " You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer. "
31 " I found that I couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. I thought the best we could all do was to look after one another and clean up the various hells we've made right here on earth. "
― Octavia E. Butler , Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2)
32 " I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me. "
― Octavia E. Butler , Bloodchild and Other Stories
33 " 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. It's harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching. "
34 " I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things. "
35 " This is the biggest lot of abolitionist trash I ever saw.”“No it isn’t,” I said. “That book wasn’t even written until a century after slavery was abolished.”“Then why the hell are they still complaining about it? "
36 " Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred. ... Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture - quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn. "
37 " I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people. "
38 " Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces. "
39 " People do blame you for the things they do to you. "
40 " I do what I can,' I said. 'When I can do more, I will. You know that. "