Quotes from Octavia E. Butler

WE ARE EARTHSEED. WE are flesh—self aware, questing, problem-solving flesh.

The possibility of meeting a white adult here frightened me, more than the possibility of street violence ever had at home.

I suspect it's a human characteristic not to know when you're well off.

How in the world can anyone get married and make babies with things the way they are now?

First-person American slave narratives should have ceased being written when the last American citizen born into institutionalized slavery died.

If all I had to look forward to was marriage to him and babies and poverty that just keeps getting worse, I think I'd kill myself.

If you knew a man was out of his mind, you restrained him. You didn't give him power.

The cops liked to solve cases by "discovering" evidence against whomever they decided must be guilty.

And Dad beams when people tell him how smart and industrious I am. I love him. He's the best person I know, and I care what he thinks. I wish I didn't, but I do.

Sometimes she sounded as though she'd never left, and sometimes she sounded as though she'd never been near any part of the south. 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.

It was ... more poison packed tight together in one place than I've ever known. Did Humans make it that way on purpose?

If everyone could feel everyone else's pain, who would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain?

O que Weylin dissera? Que ser educada não significava ser esperta. Ele tinha certa razão. Nada na minha educação ou no conhecimento do futuro havia me ajudado a escapar.

You're really going to let me go?" "Tomorrow." It was our twenty-fifth night together. He still pretended to ignore me during the day, but it had apparently become so much trouble for him to manufacture hatred against me at night. He accepted what I did for him and he did not insult me. He didn't insult anyone.

A biological conscience is better than no conscience at all.

When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.

All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.

Beware: Ignorance Protects itself. Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed. Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.

All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.