Top 100 Octavia Butler Quotes
#1. Octavia Butler, of course, is brilliant and disturbing.
Sarah Zettel
#2. Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#3. Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.
Karen Joy Fowler
#4. I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.
Octavia Butler
#5. In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.
Octavia E. Butler
#6. 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
#7. If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?
Octavia E. Butler
#9. Let go of me." It smoothed its tentacles again. "Be grateful, Joe. I'm not going to let go of you.
Octavia E. Butler
#10. No, I think the future of humanity will be like the past, we'll do what we've always done and there will still be human beings. Granted, there will always be people doing something different and there are a lot of possibilities.
Octavia Butler
#11. Mars is a rock - cold, empty, almost airless, dead. Yet it's heaven in a way. We can see it in the night sky, a whole other world, but too nearby, too close within the reach of the people who've made such a hell of life here on Earth.
Octavia E. Butler
#12. You controlled both animals and people by controlling their reproduction - controlling it absolutely.
Octavia E. Butler
#13. Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.
Octavia Butler
#14. And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.
Octavia Butler
#15. Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.
Octavia Butler
#16. My god," Bankole said. "This country has slipped back two hundred years." "Things were better when I was little," Emery said. "My mother always said they would get better again. Good times would come back. She said they always did. My father would shake his head and not say anything.
Octavia E. Butler
#17. These things frighten people. It's best not to talk about them." "But, Dad, that's like ... like ignoring a fire in the living room because we're all in the kitchen, and, besides, house fires are too scary to talk about.
Octavia E. Butler
#18. no one had been able to give him a reason why people who had excellent reasons to suppose they would destroy themselves if they did a certain thing chose to do that thing anyway.
Octavia E. Butler
#19. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status.
Octavia Butler
#20. I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
Octavia E. Butler
#21. 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 E. Butler
#23. Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn't vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.
Octavia Butler
#24. to be aware of a place where blackness was not a mark of slavery.
Octavia E. Butler
#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.
Octavia E. Butler
#27. Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.
Octavia Butler
#28. Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.
Octavia Butler
#29. 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
#30. She means the devil with people who say you're anything but what you are.
Octavia E. Butler
#32. The norm is white, apparently, in the view of people who see things in that way. For them, the only reason you would introduce a black character is to introduce this kind of abnormality. Usually, it's because you're telling a story about racism or at least about race.
Octavia E. Butler
#33. 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
#34. I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
Octavia E. Butler
#35. 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
#36. No ... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.
Octavia Butler
#37. Would you like a tuna-salad sandwich?'
'Yes,' God said. 'Thank you.
Octavia E. Butler
#39. The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind ...
Octavia E. Butler
#40. I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.
Octavia Butler
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave.
Octavia Butler
#44. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person's resolve.
Octavia E. Butler
#46. 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
#47. Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes - they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes - a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day.
Octavia Butler
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Shyness is shit. It isn't cute or feminine or appealing. It's torment, and it's shit.
Octavia E. Butler
#51. 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
#52. I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.
Octavia E. Butler
#53. Your desires, Whether or not you achieve them Will determine who you become.
Octavia E. Butler
#54. You are a good man," she had observed contentedly. "And it has been too long since I had this." He was surprised
Octavia E. Butler
#55. 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
#57. Intelligence is relatively new to life on Earth, but your hierarchical tendencies are ancient.
Octavia E. Butler
#58. We give our dead To the orchards And the groves. We give our dead To life.
Octavia Butler
#59. 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
#60. I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.
Octavia Butler
#62. 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
#63. I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership.
Octavia Butler
#64. The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. Crazy as they are, crazy as she was, they must
Octavia E. Butler
#65. I was always a doubter when it came to religion. How irrational of me, then, to love a zealot. But then, both love and zealotry are irrational states of mind.
Octavia E. Butler
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Sensible. Conservative and sensible and mature and *wrong*. Very much in character with Joanne.
Octavia E. Butler
#69. 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
#70. Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
Octavia E. Butler
#71. 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
#72. 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
#74. I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
Octavia E. Butler
#76. Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.
Octavia E. Butler
#77. 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
#78. But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.
Octavia Butler
#79. I'm sorry that astronaut will be brought back from her own chosen heaven.
Octavia E. Butler
#80. Most of us don't have to worry about being shot if we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.
Octavia Butler
#83. 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
#84. The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.
Octavia Butler
#86. 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
#87. Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.
Octavia E. Butler
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. I don't know how much of a market there is for space opera. Just because it's in the movies doesn't mean magazines are buying it.
Octavia E. Butler
#94. She jumps on me for sharing pain with the living, but she tries to share it with the dead.
Octavia E. Butler
#95. Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again." He
Octavia E. Butler
#96. I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.
Octavia Butler
#97. If you want a thing
truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible
Octavia E. Butler
#98. Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.
Octavia Butler
#99. And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.
Octavia Butler
#100. She was strange now, erratic, sometimes needing my friendship, trusting me with her dangerous longings for freedom, her wild plans to run away again; and sometimes hating me, blaming me for her trouble. One
Octavia E. Butler
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