Octavia Butler Quotes

85 Sourced Quotes

Beware:
All too often,
We say
What we hear others say.
We think
What we're told that we think.
We see
What we're permitted to see.
Worse!
We see what we're told that we see.

Octavia Butler
Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.

Octavia Butler
In order to rise From its own ashes A phoenix First Must Burn.

Octavia Butler
When I meet a woman who attracts me, I prefer women,' she said. 'And when I meet a man who attracts me, I prefer men.' 'You mean you haven't made up your mind yet.' 'I mean exactly what I said. I told you you wouldn't like it. Most people who ask want me definitely on one side or the other.

Octavia Butler
Create no images of God.
Accept the images
that God has provided.
They are everywhere,
in everything.
... The universe
is God's self-portrait.

Octavia Butler
All struggles
Are essentially
Power struggles.
Who will rule,
Who will lead,
Who will define,
refine,
confine,
design,
Who will dominate.
All struggles
Are essentially
Power struggles,
And most
are no more intellectual
than two rams
knocking their heads together.

Octavia Butler
In countries where there are no racial differences or no religious differences, people find other reasons to set aside one certain group of people and generally spit in their direction.

Octavia Butler
I don't understand why the sight of you should scare me so, Joseph said. He did not sound frightened. You don't look that threatening. Just... very different.
Different is threatening to most species, Nikanj answered. Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it's true for you.

Octavia Butler
Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

Octavia Butler
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. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.

Octavia Butler
Nothing. It just finds you a lot more attractive than it does most Humans. What can you do with a beautiful woman that you can't do with an ugly one? Nothing. It's just a matter of preference.

Octavia Butler
He thought about that for a moment, wondered what he should say. The truth or nothing. The truth.

Octavia Butler
Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have.

Octavia Butler
Now I have been raped.
It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.

Octavia Butler
I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.

Octavia Butler
Consider history as our emergency medical system. It works real well at that level, but unfortunately, we have to wait until the disaster looms. With a disaster like global warming, it's too late to worry about when it's looming except to figure out how to adapt to it.

Octavia Butler
To get along with God, Consider the consequences of your behavior. Earthseed: The Books of the Living

Octavia Butler
We are a naturally hierarchical species. When I say these things in my novels, sure I make up the aliens and all of that, but I don't make up the essential human character, the way we are.

Octavia Butler
I'm literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.

Octavia Butler
Consider—
We are born
Not with purpose,
But with potential.

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

Octavia Butler
He's a fair man.
I looked at him, startled.
I said fair, he repeated. Not likable.
I kept quiet. His father wasn't the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn't a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.

Octavia Butler
He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.

Octavia Butler
Beware:
Ignorance
Protects itself
Ignorance
Promotes suspicion.
Suspicion
Engenders fear.
Fear quails,
Irrational and blind,
Or fear looms,
Defiant and closed.
Blind, closed,
Suspicious, afraid,
Ignorance
Protects itself,
And protected,
Ignorance grows.

Octavia Butler
We give our dead
To the orchards
And the groves.
We give our dead
To life.

Octavia Butler
Human beings fear difference, Lilith had told him once. Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don't understand this, you will. You'll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior. And she had put her hand on his hair. When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference.

Octavia Butler
Freedom is dangerous, Cory, but it's precious, too. You can't just throw it away or let it slip away. You can't sell it for bread and pottage.

Octavia Butler
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Octavia Butler
Jarrett would be easier to take if he cared half as much about children's bodies and minds as he pretends to care about their souls.

Octavia Butler
I realize I don't know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic.

Octavia Butler