Quotes from Octavia E. Butler

breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.

Change does scare most people.

CIVILIZATION IS TO GROUPS what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.

CIVILIZATION IS TO GROUPS what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive

Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of "heathen houses of devil-worship," he has a simple answer: "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.

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

questions more readily than an adult. I looked at him. He looked back, curious and unafraid. He was not Rufus. I could see

When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.

In the 2020s, when these people were sick, starving, or trying to keep warm, they had no time or energy to look beyond their own desperate situations.

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.

Sometimes people say I look grim or angry. Better to have them think that than know the truth. Better to have them think anything than let them know just how easy it is to hurt me.

This is just more denial: A dumb little game of "If we don't talk about bad things, maybe they won't happen.

No one should travel alone in this world.

They forced you to have kids?" the man asked. "One of them surprised me," she said. "It made me pregnant, then told me about it. Said it was giving me what I wanted but would never come out and ask for." "Was it?" "Yes." She shook her head from side to side. "Oh, yes. But if I had the strength not to ask, it should have had the strength to let me alone.

was both afraid of them and glad of their human presence. Dangerous as they could be to me, somehow, they did not seem as threatening as the dark shadowy woods with its strange sounds, its unknowns.

You're so young. It seems almost criminal that you should be so young in these terrible times.

God is Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay.' We decide which aspect we embrace

He saw her as she had been when he met her at UCLA. He was going to fight diseases of the body and she, diseases of a society that seemed to her too shortsighted and indifferent to survive. She preached at him about old-fashioned, long-lost causes—human rights, the elderly, the ecology, throwaway children, corporate government, the vast rich-poor gap and the shrinking middle class. …She should have been born twenty or thirty years earlier.

I told as much of the truth as I could.

He had a man's voice already. He had everything but a man's brain.

What was he, he wondered, that he could have anything at all but an end?

That was what she said in the first of her verses in Earthseed: The First Book of the Living. All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.

one is…a major key to us, to human beings, I mean. When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness.