Quotes from Octavia E. Butler

These things frighten people. It's best not to talk about them." "But, Dad, that's like … like ignoring a fire in the living room because we're all in the kitchen, and, besides, house fires are too scary to talk about.

There is no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you.

why can't I do what others have done—ignore the obvious. Live a normal life. It's hard enough just to do that in this world.

Let them see that you trust them & let them solve their own problems, make their own decisions.Do that & they will commit their lives to you. Bully the, control them out of fear or malice or just for your own convenience, & after a while you'll have to spend all your time thinking for them, controlling them, & stifling their resentment.

We'll have to be very careful how we allow our needs to shape us.

The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one's own place, One's own people, One's own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise— Into growth and destruction, Into solitude and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.

Yes," he said, "intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn't matter.

Your desires,           Whether or not you achieve them           Will determine who you become.

Nothing. It just finds you a lot more attractive than it does most Humans. What can you do with a beautiful woman that you can't do with an ugly one? Nothing. It's just a matter of preference.

Shyness is shit. It isn't cute or feminine or appealing. It's torment, and it's shit.

I found that I couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. I thought the best we could all do was to look after one another and clean up the various hells we've made right here on earth.

First learning, then proving I'd learned. Knowing and using the knowledge aren't the same thing.

If you work hard enough at something that doesn't matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.

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. I

She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn't kill, but she seemed to die a little.

The Self must create           Its own reasons for being.           To shape God,           Shape Self.

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?

She means it doesn't come off, Dana... The black. She means the devil with people who say you're anything but what you are.

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.

It's better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It's harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching.

Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant.

I lost an arm on my last trip home.

Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it.

I'm still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.