Quotes from Octavia E. Butler

But if all I had to look forward to was marriage to him and babies and poverty that just keeps getting worse, I think I'd kill myself.

God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But God exists to be shaped. It isn't enough for us to just survive, limping along, playing business as usual while things get worse and worse. If that's the shape we give to God, then someday we must become too weak—too poor, too hungry, too sick—to defend ourselves. Then we'll be wiped out.

I would like to give them a grove of oak trees, I said. Trees are better than stone- life commemorating life.

You can't come back all at once any more than you can leave all at once. It takes time. After a while, though, things will fall into place.

The bed was what it had always been: a solid platform that gave slightly to the touch and that seemed to grow from the floor.

Peace is dangerous because it encourages complacency and carelessness

Reading these tales is like looking at a photograph of a child whom you only knew as an adult. In her eyes you can see the woman that you came to know much later—a face, not yet fully formed, that contains the promise of something that is now a part of you: the welcomed surprise of recognition in innocent eyes.

No one is who we think they are," I said. "That's what we get for not being telepathic.

Help us to make America great again

There are times when I wish I believed in hell—other than the hells we make for one another, I mean.

And the only way to prove to yourself you have power is to use it.

Earth is a big place. Even if parts of it are uninhabitable, it's still a damn big place.

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.

We dull your natural fear of strangers and of difference. We keep you from injuring or killing us or yourselves.

A leader Most will follow, Or a tyrant Most fear.

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 everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant. And once we did understand them, the Humans got angry and acted as though we had stolen thoughts from their minds.

How could sane people like the ones he had left behind in Phoenix do such a thing—or, how could they let insane people gain control of devices that could do so much harm? If you knew a man was out of his mind, you restrained him. You didn't give him power.

If you can think of ways to entertain them and teach them at the same time, you'll get your information out. And all without making anyone look down." "Look down … ?" "Into the abyss, Daughter.

This could be a great time to live in," Kevin said once. "I keep thinking what an experience it would be to stay in it—go West and watch the building of the country, see how much of the Old West mythology is true.

They consider it a sin to take any life, yet they kill and kill.

The powerful imaginative impulse that produced Kindred had its first test runs in the escapist fantasies of a child who needed to find or invent alternative realties. By temperament and by virtue of her strict Baptist upbringing, Butler was reclusive; imaginary worlds solaced her against the pinched rewards of the actual world, and books took the place of friends.

She glanced at him. "What gods do you respect?" "None." "And why not?" "I help myself," he said.

The police," my father told them, "may be able to avenge you, but they can't protect you.

Humans had evolved from hierarchical life, dominating, often killing other life. Oankali had evolved from acquisitive life, collecting and combining with other life. To kill was not simply wasteful to the Oankali. It was as unacceptable as slicing off their own healthy limbs.