Quotes from Octavia E. Butler

I want you to be serious. 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.

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

Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.

God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But there's hope in understanding the nature of God—not punishing or jealous, but infinitely malleable. There's comfort in realizing that everyone and everything yields to God. There's power in knowing that God can be focused, diverted, shaped by anyone at all. But there's no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you. You know that.

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.

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.

We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough. Then we go on to create super-people - super-parents, super-kings, and queens, super-cops - to be our gods and to look after us - to stand between us and God. Yet God has been here all along, shaping us and being shaped by us in no particular way or in too many ways at once like an amoeba - or like a cancer. Chaos.

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

We can, Each of us, Do the impossible As long as we can convince ourselves That it has been done before.

I began writing about power because I had so little.

You are a good man," she had observed contentedly. "And it has been too long since I had this." He was surprised

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.

Most people have given up on politicians. After all, politicians have been promising to return us to the glory, wealth, and order of the twentieth century ever since I can remember.

When I was older, I decided that getting a rejection slip was like being told your child was ugly. You got mad and didn't believe a word of it. Besides, look at all the really ugly literary children out there in the world being published and doing fine!

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

Why is the universe? To shape God. Why is God? To shape the universe. I can't get rid of it. I've tried to change it or dump it, but I can't. I cannot. It feels like the truest thing I've ever written. It's as mysterious and as obvious as any other explanation of God or the universe that I've ever read, except that to me the others feel inadequate, at best.

All successful life is Adaptable, Opportunistic, Tenacious, Interconnected, and Fecund. Understand this. Use it. Shape God.

As habit is more dependable than inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than talent.

Good stories are good stories, no matter how they're categorized.

Clay was slowly deciding to kill himself. It was slow because, in spite of everything Clay did not want to die. He was just becoming less and less able to tolerate the pain of living.

Human beings are good at creating hells for themselves, even out of richness.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—the ones abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship rights—still exist, but they've been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don't much matter.

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.