Quotes from Octavia E. Butler

On the street, people are expected to fear and hate everyone but their own kind, but with all of us armed and watchful, people stared, but they let us alone. Our neighborhood is too small for us to play those kinds of games.

That's an old company-town trick—get people into debt, hang on to them, and work them harder. Debt slavery.

Jarret's supporters are more than a little seduced by Jarret's talk of making America great again. He seems to be unhappy with certain other countries.

My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped "the company." I've never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that's the way it will be. That's the way it is.

All that money wasted on another crazy space trip when so many people here on earth can't afford water, food, or shelter.

Poor doesn't matter as much if you can make a place for yourself and be respected.

Everyone would still be here, frozen in time just as I left them. But no, that's fantasy.

Jarret's supporters are more than a little seduced by Jarret's talk of making America great again. He seems to be unhappy with certain other countries. We could

You're supposed to be dirty now. If you're clean, you make a target of yourself. People think you're showing off, trying to be better than they are. Among the younger kids, being clean is a great way to start a fight.

She seemed to be able to turn the accent on and off. She tended to turn it on for comforting people, and for threatening to kill them.

Nothing like a war to rally people around flag, country, and great leader.

Kevin, you don't have to beat people to treat them brutally." "Wait a minute," he said. "I'm not minimizing the wrong that's being done here. I just …" "Yes you are. You don't mean to be, but you are.

Even my mother said that things were improving. Yet Andrew Steele Jarret was able to scare, divide, and bully people, first into electing him President, then into letting him fix the country for them. He didn't get to do everything he wanted to do. He was capable of much greater fascism. So were his most avid followers.

one way to make people afraid of you is to have a crazy side—a side of yourself or your organization that's dangerous and unpredictable—willing to do any damned thing.

Politicians and big corporations get the bread, and we get the circuses.

Comecei a escrever sobre poder porque era algo que eu tinha muito pouco

What is it in young boys that makes them want to wander off alone and get killed? They get two chin hairs and they're trying to prove they're men.

He's had to distance himself from the worst of his followers. But 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?

I walked down the middle of the street looking and listening and trying to avoid potholes and chunks of broken asphalt. There was little other trash. Anything that would burn, people would use as fuel. Anything that could be reused or sold had been gathered. Cory used to comment on that. Poverty, she said, had made the streets cleaner.

Opening and closing her jacket, her hand touched the long scar across her abdomen. She had acquired it somehow between her second and third Awakenings, had examined it fearfully, wondering what had been done to her. What had she lost or gained, and why?

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. I am also comfortably asocial - a hermit in the middle of Seattle - a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.

Earthseed, there is no promised afterlife.

Its promise is of hard work and brand-new possibilities, problems, challenges, and changes.

What does Jarett really think about the Crusaders? Does he control them? If he doesn't like what they're doing, he should make some effort to stop them. He shouldn't want them to make their insanity part of his political image. On the other hand, one way to make people afraid of you is to have a crazy side--a side of yourself or your organization that's dangerous and unpredictable--willing to do any damned thing.