Home > Author > Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler QUOTES

Octavia E. Butler QUOTES

141 " Writing is difficult. You do it all alone without encouragement and without any certainty that you'll ever be published or paid or even that you'll be able to finish the particular work you've begun. It isn't easy to persist amid all that. [...] Sometimes when I'm interviewed, the interviewer either compliments me on my 'talent', my 'gift' or asks me how I discovered it. [...] I used to struggle to answer this politely, to explain that I didn't believe much in writing talent. People who want to write either do it or they don't. At last I began to say that my most important talent - or habit - was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up. "

― Octavia E. Butler

142 " The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one’s own place, One’s own people, One’s own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise— Into growth and destruction, Into solitude and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2)

143 " I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Kindred

144 " Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Kindred

145 "           Embrace diversity.           Unite—           Or be divided,           robbed,           ruled,           killed           By those who see you as prey.           Embrace diversity           Or be destroyed. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)

146 " We’ll have to be very careful how we allow our needs to shape us. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)

147 " Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. It made no sense. No matter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Kindred

148 " God is not to be prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that persons resolve. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)

149 " This was something new. Or something old. I didn’t think of what it might be until after I had let Aubrey go back to the clinic to bed down next to her child. Bankole had given him something to help him sleep. He did the same for her, so I won’t be able to ask her anything more until she wakes up later this morning. I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether these people, with their crosses, had some connection with my current least favorite presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret. It sounds like the sort of thing his people might do—a revival of something nasty out of the past. Did the Ku Klux Klan wear crosses—as well as burn them? The Nazis wore the swastika, which is a kind of cross, but I don’t think they wore it on their chests. There were crosses all over the place during the Inquisition and before that, during the Crusades. So now we have another group that uses crosses and slaughters people. Jarret’s people could be behind it. Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them. Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and burn people at the stake for being witches. Witches! In 2032! A witch, in their view, tends to be a Moslem, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or, in some parts of the country, a Mormon, a Jehovah’s Witness, or even a Catholic. A witch may also be an atheist, a “cultist,” or a well-to-do eccentric. Well-to-do eccentrics often have no protectors or much that’s worth stealing. And “cultist” is a great catchall term for anyone who fits into no other large category, and yet doesn’t quite match Jarret’s version of Christianity. Jarret’s people have been known to beat or drive out Unitarians, for goodness’ sake. Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of “heathen houses of devil-worship,” he has a simple answer: “Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2)

150 " Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Imago (Xenogenesis, #3)

151 " Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Dawn (Xenogenesis, #1)

152 "           The Self must create           Its own reasons for being.           To shape God,           Shape Self. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)

153 " he still knows how to rouse his rabble, how to reach out to poor people, and sic them on other poor people. How much of this nonsense does he believe, I wonder, and how much does he say just because he knows the value of dividing in order to conquer and to rule? "

― Octavia E. Butler , Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2)

154 " A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you've captured us, and we can't escape. But you're more than only the composition and the workings of your bodies. You are your personalities, your cultures. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Dawn (Xenogenesis, #1)

155 " 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 …” The rattling sounded again. “That was like ignoring cancer. I think your people did not realize what a dangerous thing they were doing. "

― Octavia E. Butler , Dawn (Xenogenesis, #1)

156 " All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God "

― Octavia E. Butler , Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)

157 " 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 , Bloodchild and Other Stories

158 " All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. "

― Octavia E. Butler

159 " I can change myself, but it’s an effort. And it doesn’t last. It’s easier to do as water does: allow myself to be contained, and take on the shape of my containers. "

― Octavia E. Butler

160 " The differences you perceive between Humans—between groups of Humans—are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments "

― Octavia E. Butler , Adulthood Rites (Xenogenesis, #2)