Octavia Butler Quotes

85 Sourced Quotes

I'm not a demagogue.
That's too bad. That leaves the field to people who are demagogues—to the Jarrets of the world. And there have always been Jarrets. Probably there always will be.

Octavia Butler
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 new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.

Octavia Butler
Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter.

Octavia Butler
I got up to leave. There was nothing more to be said. He had asked for what he knew I could not give, and I had refused.

Octavia Butler
We've also been laughed at, argued with, booed, and threatened with hellfire—or gunfire. But Jarret's kind of religion and Jarret himself are getting less and less popular these days. Both, it seems, are bad for business, bad for the U. S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they've just made others very angry.

Octavia Butler
Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe. To us, that makes it the most powerful reality, and just another word for God. Earthseed: The Books of the Living Lauren Oya Olamina

Octavia Butler
When it comes to strangers with guns, I told her, I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust.

Octavia Butler
A victim of God may,
Through learning adaption,
Become a partner of God,
A victim of God may,
Through forethought and planning,
Become a shaper of God.
Or a victim of God may,
Through shortsightedness and fear,
Remain God's victim,
God's plaything,
God's prey.

Octavia Butler
We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.

Octavia Butler
From what I've read, I said to him, the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is to survive until it goes sane again.

Octavia Butler
No one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people's children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn't hurt them!

Octavia Butler
How completely, how thoroughly he has stolen my child. I have never even tried to forgive him.

Octavia Butler
When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn't in any of this stuff I read. I certainly wasn't in the science fiction. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing.

Octavia Butler
Yes, he said, intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn't matter. A cancer growing in someone's body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.

Octavia Butler
I might not have believed this if a Human had said it. Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everybody had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant.

Octavia Butler
Are you Earthseed?
Do you believe?
Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action—
Or it does nothing.

Octavia Butler
Yori, Human purpose isn't what you say it is or what I say it is. It's what your biology says it is—what your genes say it is.

Octavia Butler
I didn't want to scare you. We don't want to scare anyone.
No? Well, sometimes it's a good thing to scare people. Sometimes fear is all that will keep them from doing stupid things.

Octavia Butler
She found more gratification in teaching one willing student than a dozen resentful ones.

Octavia Butler
Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn't find anything to complain about.

Octavia Butler
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.

Octavia Butler
When vision fails
Direction is lost.

When direction is lost
Purpose may be forgotten.

When purpose if forgotten
Emotion rules alone.

When emotion rules alone,
Destruction... destruction.

Octavia Butler
Souls! When have you seen your own soul — that you're so certain you have one?

Octavia Butler
Drowning people
Sometimes die
Fighting their rescuers.

Octavia Butler
We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's the way things are. That's the way things always have been.

Octavia Butler