Quotes from Octavia E. Butler

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

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.

INTELLIGENCE IS ONGOING, INDIVIDUAL adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.

But those dedicated to other religions, and those who are not religious at all sneer at Jarret and call him a hypocrite. They sneer, they hate him, but they also fear him. They see him for the tyrant that he is. And the thugs see him as one of them. They envy him. He is the bigger, the more successful thief, murderer, and slaver.

Moral: The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn't always safe, but it's often necessary.

Once he's made everyone who isn't like him sound evil, then he can blame them for problems he knows they didn't cause. That's easier than trying to fix the problems.

The stars are free." She shrugs. "I'd rather have the city lights back myself, the sooner the better. But we can afford the stars.

Darkness Gives shape to the light As light Shapes the darkness. Death Gives shape to life As life Shapes death. The universe And God Share this wholeness, Each Defining the other. God Gives shape to the universe As the universe Shapes God.

In spite of your loss and pain, you aren't alone. You still have people who care about you and want you to be all right. You still have family.

Human competitiveness and territoriality were often at the root of particularly horrible fashions in oppression. We human beings seem always to have found it comforting to have someone to took down on—a bottom level of fellow creatures who are very vulnerable, but who can somehow be blamed and punished for all or any troubles. We need this lowest class as much as we need equals to team with and to compete against and superiors to look to for direction and help.

People speculate about intelligent life, and it's fun to think about, but no one is claiming to have found anyone to talk to out there. I don't care. Life alone is enough. I find it . . . more exciting and encouraging than I can explain, more important than I can explain. There is life out there.

This means God is not to be prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that persons resolve. If they're used that way, they can help us in our only real relationship with God.

It shouldn't be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction.

A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super-person. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.

Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe.

But we can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our forethought, with or without our intent.

Then … Rufus's fear of death calls me to him, and my own fear of death sends me home.

Some say God is a spirit, a force, an ultimate reality. Ask seven people what all of that means and you'll get seven different answers. So what is God? Just another name for whatever makes you feel special and protected?

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.

Because as much as I want all that I said to be true, it isn't. We'll be moved, all right. It's just a matter of when, by whom, and in how many pieces.

Dad warned us all about water stations, trying to prepare us in case we ever went out and got caught far enough from home to be tempted to stop for water. His advice: "Don't do it. Suffer. Get your rear end home." Yeah.

We don't have to wait for anything at all. What we have to do is start.

The Human Contradiction again. The Contradiction, it was more often called among Oankali. Intelligence and hierarchical behavior. It was fascinating, seductive, and lethal. It had brought Humans to their final war.

Why do you always expect the worst of everyone?' When it comes to strangers with guns,' I told her, 'I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust.