Top 100 Octavia E. Butler Quotes
#1. I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.
Octavia E. Butler
#3. to be aware of a place where blackness was not a mark of slavery.
Octavia E. Butler
#4. She means the devil with people who say you're anything but what you are.
Octavia E. Butler
#6. 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 E. Butler
#7. I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
Octavia E. Butler
#8. What are you?" I whispered."What are we to you?"
She lay still, rested her head on her topmost coil. "You know me as no other does," she said softly. "You must decide.
Octavia E. Butler
#9. The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind ...
Octavia E. Butler
#10. There is no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you.
Octavia E. Butler
#11. I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.
Octavia E. Butler
#12. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person's resolve.
Octavia E. Butler
#13. why can't I do what others have done - ignore the obvious. Live a normal life. It's hard enough just to do that in this world.
Octavia E. Butler
#14. 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 E. Butler
#15. Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.
Octavia E. Butler
#16. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you're afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It's about not being able to stop at all.
Octavia E. Butler
#17. I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.
Octavia E. Butler
#18. Your desires, Whether or not you achieve them Will determine who you become.
Octavia E. Butler
#19. My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.
Octavia E. Butler
#21. Intelligence is relatively new to life on Earth, but your hierarchical tendencies are ancient.
Octavia E. Butler
#22. Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow.
Octavia E. Butler
#23. 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.
Octavia E. Butler
#24. I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children's stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, 'Can't you write anything normal?'
Octavia E. Butler
#25. 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.
Octavia E. Butler
#26. Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
Octavia E. Butler
#27. After a few years of watching the human species make things unnecessarily difficult for itself I have little hope that it will do anything more than survive and continue its cycle of errors.
Octavia E. Butler
#28. The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.
Octavia E. Butler
#29. I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
Octavia E. Butler
#30. Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.
Octavia E. Butler
#31. Here we are - Energy, Mass, Life, Shaping life, Mind, Shaping Mind, God, Shaping God. Consider - We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.
Octavia E. Butler
#32. I'm sorry that astronaut will be brought back from her own chosen heaven.
Octavia E. Butler
#33. People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.
Octavia E. Butler
#34. As a black and as a woman, I didn't think that I would really want to live in any of the eras before this, because I would inevitably be worse off. I would have spent more time struggling just to prove I was human than doing my work.
Octavia E. Butler
#36. There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair.
Octavia E. Butler
#37. Most vampires I have discovered are men for some reason. I guess it's because of Dracula; people are kind of feeding off that.
Octavia E. Butler
#38. Your body said one thing. Your words said another." It moved a sensory arm to the back of his neck, looping one coil loosely around his neck. "This is the position," it said. "I'll stop now if you like.
Octavia E. Butler
#39. When vision fails Direction is lost. When direction is lost Purpose may be forgotten. When purpose is forgotten Emotion rules alone. When emotion rules alone, Destruction ... destruction. F
Octavia E. Butler
#40. Self is.
Self is body and bodily
perception. Self is thought, memory,
belief. Self creates. Self destroys.
Self learns, discovers, becomes.
Self shapes. Self adapts. Self
invents its own reasons for being.
To shape God, shape Self.
Octavia E. Butler
#41. Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.
Octavia E. Butler
#42. We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough.
Octavia E. Butler
#43. I'm trying to speak
to write-the truth. Im trying to be clear. I'm not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.
Octavia E. Butler
#44. I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.
Octavia E. Butler
#46. Human beings are more alike than different - damn sure more alike than we like to admit. I wonder if the same thing wouldn't have happened eventually, no matter which two cultures gained the ability to wipe one another out along with the rest of the world." Lilith
Octavia E. Butler
#47. Could she give Doro what he wanted - what she herself had wanted for so long - children who would not die?
Octavia E. Butler
#48. Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world.
Octavia E. Butler
#49. I can take a lot of pain without falling apart. I've had to learn to do that. But it was hard, today, to keep peddling and keep up with the others when just about everyone I saw made me feel worse and worse. My
Octavia E. Butler
#50. 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
#51. 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? Well,
Octavia E. Butler
#52. 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 E. Butler
#53. As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else's trouble.
Octavia E. Butler
#54. 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
#55. Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.
Octavia E. Butler
#56. Akin rested his chin on Iriarte's shoulder and savored the strange pale scents - all pale now.
Octavia E. Butler
#57. Did she struggle for life only out of habit, or because some part of her still hoped that there was something worth living for?
Octavia E. Butler
#59. Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.
Octavia E. Butler
#60. Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don't know what they're doing!" She
Octavia E. Butler
#61. 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
#62. Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
Octavia E. Butler
#63. Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of "wrong" ideas.
Octavia E. Butler
#64. Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.
Octavia E. Butler
#65. 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?
Octavia E. Butler
#67. The essentials," I answered, "are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.
Octavia E. Butler
#68. Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.
Octavia E. Butler
#69. The major tragedies in life, there's just no compensation. But the minor ones you can always write about. It's my way of dealing, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than psychiatrists. The story, you see, will get you through.
Octavia E. Butler
#70. In small communities, she believed, people are more accountable to one another. Serious misbehavior is harder to get away with, harder even to begin when everyone who sees you knows who you are, where you live, who your family is, and whether you have any business doing what you're doing.
Octavia E. Butler
#71. She had learned to keep her sanity by accepting things as she found them, adapting herself to new circumstances by putting aside the old ones whose memories might overwhelm her. She
Octavia E. Butler
#73. Entropy, the idea that the natural flow of heat is from something hot to something cool - not the other way - so that the universe itself is cooling down, running down, dissipating its energy.
Octavia E. Butler
#74. Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it.
Octavia E. Butler
#75. He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.
Octavia E. Butler
#76. Purpose
Unifies us:
It focuses our dreams,
Guides our plans,
Strengthens our efforts.
Purpose
Defines us,
Shapes us,
And offers us
Greatness.
Octavia E. Butler
#78. 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.
Octavia E. Butler
#79. 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 E. Butler
#80. Several years ago, when I was about to start a novel, I thought I might get some mileage out of the idea of a civilization in which people somehow felt - that is, they shared - all the pain and all the pleasure they caused one another.
Octavia E. Butler
#81. AT LEAST THREE YEARS ago, my fathers God stopped being my God. His church stopped being my church. And yet, today, because I'm a coward, I let myself be initiated into that church. I let my father baptize me in all three names of that God who isn't mine any more. My God has another name.
Octavia E. Butler
#82. Frankly, it never occurred to me that I needed someone who looked like me to show me the way. I was ignorant and arrogant and persistent and the writing left me no choice at all.9
Octavia E. Butler
#83. My God doesn't love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.
Octavia E. Butler
#84. To get along with God,
Consider the consequences of your behavior.
Earthseed: The Books of the Living
Octavia E. Butler
#85. I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.
Octavia E. Butler
#86. I'm still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.
Octavia E. Butler
#87. She glanced at him. "What gods do you respect?" "None." "And why not?" "I help myself," he said.
Octavia E. Butler
#88. That's all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don't know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won't matter if we don't survive these times.
Octavia E. Butler
#89. She just couldn't face caring for a child all alone.'
'People do it all the time.'
'She wasn't "people", she was herself. She knew what she could handle and what she couldn't.
Octavia E. Butler
#90. Yes," he said, "intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn't matter.
Octavia E. Butler
#91. She and Harry may be the most loyal, least religious people in the community, but there are times when people need religion more than they need anything else - even people like Zahra and Harry.
Octavia E. Butler
#92. Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.
Octavia E. Butler
#93. Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.
Octavia E. Butler
#94. Or it's happening because Shori is black, and racists - probably Ina racists - don't like the idea that a good part of the answer to your daytime problems is melanin.
Octavia E. Butler
#95. 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 E. Butler
#96. People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is of course you wouldn't.
Octavia E. Butler
#97. You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.
That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Octavia E. Butler
#98. Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights.
Octavia E. Butler
#99. That educated didn't mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.
Octavia E. Butler
#100. Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
Octavia E. Butler
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