Quotes from Octavia E. Butler

For myself …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.

Yes," he said, "intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn't matter. 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.

The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.

some earlier, "simpler" time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country.

If God is Change, then... then who loves us? Who cares about us? Who cares for us?" "We care for one another," I said. "We care for ourselves and one another.

Do not worship God Inexorable God Neither needs nor wants Your worship. Instead, Acknowledge and attend God, Learn from God, With forethought and intelligence, Imagination and industry, Shape God. When you must, Yield to God. Adapt and endure.

Your teachers Are all around you. All that you perceive, All that you experience, All that is given to you or taken from you, All that you love or hate, need or fear Will teach you— If you will learn. God is your first and your last teacher. God is your harshest teacher: subtle, demanding. Learn or die.

Belief will not save you. Only actions Guided and shaped By belief and knowledge Will save you. Belief Initiates and guides action— Or it does nothing.

Patrols. Groups of young whites who ostensibly maintained order among the slaves. Patrols. Forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan.

Akin rested his chin on Iriarte's shoulder and savored the strange pale scents—all pale now.

To benefit your world, Your people, Your life, Consider consequences, Minimize harm Ask questions, Seek answers, Learn, Teach.

My memory of my aunt and uncle told me that even people who loved me could demand more of me than I could give—and expect their demands to be met simply because I owed them.

Respect God: Pray working. Pray learning, planning, doing. Pray creating, teaching, reaching. Pray working. Pray to focus your thoughts, still your fears, strengthen your purpose. Respect God. Shape God. Pray working. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Then, finally, true success. Isaac.

Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.

We couldn't survive as a people if we were always confined to one ship or one world.

And what? You think it's going to get sane? It's never been sane. You just have to go ahead and live, no matter what." I didn't know what to say, so I kissed

They're both afraid. They look at their children--Alan has four kids, too--and they're afraid and ashamed of their fear, ashamed of their powerlessness. And they're tired. There are millions of people like them--people who are frightened and just plain tired of all the chaos. They want someone to do something. Fix things. Now!

It seems inevitable that people who can't read are going to lean more toward judging candidates on the way they look and sound than on what they claim they stand for. Even people who can read and are educated are apt to pay more attention to good looks and seductive lies than they should. And no doubt the new picture ballots on the nets will give Jarret an even greater advantage.

The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. Crazy as they are, crazy as she was, they must

intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn't matter. A cancer growing in someone's body will go on growing in spite of denial.

These were God's people come to bring the true faith to the cultist heathens. I suppose if some of the heathens died of it, that wasn't really very important.

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.

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. There has to be more that we can do, a better destiny that we can shape. Another place. Another way. Something!