Top 100 Octavia E Butler Quotes
#1. I like to read Octavia E. Butler's 'Wild Seed' over and over again. And J. California Cooper's 'The Wake of the Wind.' That one makes me cry from joy. I'll mourn - I'll actually mourn - and then I'll cry from joy. She's wonderful.
Jill Scott
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?
Octavia E. Butler
#6. Let go of me." It smoothed its tentacles again. "Be grateful, Joe. I'm not going to let go of you.
Octavia E. Butler
#7. 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
#8. You controlled both animals and people by controlling their reproduction - controlling it absolutely.
Octavia E. Butler
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#15. to be aware of a place where blackness was not a mark of slavery.
Octavia E. Butler
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. She means the devil with people who say you're anything but what you are.
Octavia E. Butler
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
Octavia E. Butler
#23. 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
#24. Would you like a tuna-salad sandwich?'
'Yes,' God said. 'Thank you.
Octavia E. Butler
#26. The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind ...
Octavia E. Butler
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person's resolve.
Octavia E. Butler
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Shyness is shit. It isn't cute or feminine or appealing. It's torment, and it's shit.
Octavia E. Butler
#34. 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
#35. I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.
Octavia E. Butler
#36. Your desires, Whether or not you achieve them Will determine who you become.
Octavia E. Butler
#37. 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
#38. 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
#40. Intelligence is relatively new to life on Earth, but your hierarchical tendencies are ancient.
Octavia E. Butler
#41. 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
#42. The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. Crazy as they are, crazy as she was, they must
Octavia E. Butler
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Sensible. Conservative and sensible and mature and *wrong*. Very much in character with Joanne.
Octavia E. Butler
#47. 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
#48. Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
Octavia E. Butler
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
Octavia E. Butler
#53. Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.
Octavia E. Butler
#54. 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
#55. I'm sorry that astronaut will be brought back from her own chosen heaven.
Octavia E. Butler
#58. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#68. She jumps on me for sharing pain with the living, but she tries to share it with the dead.
Octavia E. Butler
#69. Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again." He
Octavia E. Butler
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. 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
#74. Daddy's the only man I know," he said softly, "who cares as much about giving his word to a black as to a white.
Octavia E. Butler
#75. 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
#78. I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.
Octavia E. Butler
#79. 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
#80. Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.
Octavia E. Butler
#81. We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough.
Octavia E. Butler
#82. 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
#83. As a country, we've given up our birthright for even less than bread and pottage. We've given it up for nothing - although I'm sure some people somewhere are richer now.
Octavia E. Butler
#85. I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.
Octavia E. Butler
#86. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.
Octavia E. Butler
#87. You want to know how moral she is?" His tone made me frown. "What do you mean?" "If she chases me any harder, she and I will wind up playing a scene from that Bible she reads. The scene between Potiphar's wife and Joseph.
Octavia E. Butler
#89. Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
Octavia E. Butler
#90. I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.
Octavia E. Butler
#91. We can,
Each of us,
Do the impossible
As long as we can convince ourselves
That it has been done before.
Octavia E. Butler
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Most Humans lose access to old memories as they acquire new ones. They know how to speak, for instance, but they don't recall learning to speak. They keep what experience has taught them - usually - but lose the experience itself. We
Octavia E. Butler
#96. Could she give Doro what he wanted - what she herself had wanted for so long - children who would not die?
Octavia E. Butler
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.
Octavia E. Butler
#100. 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
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