Quotes from Octavia E. Butler

To shape God With wisdom and forethought, To benefit your world, Your people, Your life, Consider consequences, Minimize harm Ask questions, Seek answers, Learn, Teach.

Y qué debería estar haciendo yo? ¿Qué puedo hacer? En menos de un año voy a tener dieciocho y seré adulta, una adulta sin más expectativas que la vida en nuestro barrio que se está desintegrando.

Chaos Is God's most dangerous face— Amorphous, roiling, hungry. Shape Chaos— Shape God. Act. Alter the speed Or the direction of Change. Vary the scope of Change. Recombine the seeds of Change. Transmute the impact of Change. Seize Change. Use it. Adapt and grow.

The ooloi have seen to it that you'll have a chance to live on your Earth—not just to die on it.

All people who know what it is to end should be allowed to continue if they can continue.

For my people, I respect the gods. I speak as the voice of a god. For myself... in my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune.

I still don't believe you," she said. "Things don't have to be as bad as you say they are.

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 as they grew into crises.

All struggles Are essentially power struggles, And most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.

Lilith?" The usual, quiet, androgynous voice. She drew a deep, weary breath. "What?" she asked. But as she spoke, she realized the voice had not come from above as it always had before. She sat up quickly and looked around. In one corner she found the shadowy figure of a man, thin and long-haired.

It's about learning to live in partnership with one another in small communities, and at the same time, working out a sustainable partnership with our environment. It's about treating education and adaptability as the absolute essentials that they are.

People are setting fires to get rid of whomever they dislike from personal enemies to anyone who looks or sounds foreign or racially different. People are setting fires because they're frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.

This world would be better if people lived according to the teachings of almost any religion.

Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.

Turn a few pages and you'll find a white man named J. D. B. DeBow claiming that slavery is good because, among other things, it gives poor whites someone to look down on. That's history. It happened whether it offends you or not.

I heard disbelief and questioning, threats and cursing, honor and disgust.

There are fewer and fewer jobs among us, more of us being born, more kids growing up with nothing to look forward to. One way or another, we'll all be poor some day. The adults say things will get better, but they never have.

JDAHYA WOULD NOT LEAVE her. As much as she had hated her solitary confinement, she longed to be rid of him. He fell silent for a while and she wondered whether he might be sleeping—to the degree that he did sleep. She lay down herself, wondering whether she could relax enough to sleep with him there. It would be like going to sleep knowing there was a rattlesnake in the room, knowing she could wake up and find it in her bed.

Once you grow past Mommy and Daddy coming running when you're hurt, you're really on your own. You're alone, and there's no one to help you

I can take a lot of pain without falling apart. I've had to learn to do that. But it was hard, today, to keep peddling and keep up with the others when just about everyone I saw made me feel worse and worse. My

All struggles Are essentially power struggles. Who will rule, Who will lead, Who will define, refine, confine, design, Who will dominate. All struggles Are essentially power struggles, And most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together. EARTHSEED:

A tree Cannot grow In its parents' shadows.

Were all slaves so thin—underfed, overworked, and taught that most things hurt?

People who are intelligent, ambitious, and at the same time, in the grip of odd obsessions can be dangerous.