Quotes from Octavia E. Butler

The differences you perceive between Humans—between groups of Humans—are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments

Read every day and learn from what you read.

Or it's happening because Shori is black, and racists—probably Ina racists—don't like the idea that a good part of the answer to your daytime problems is melanin.

A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you've captured us, and we can't escape. But you're more than only the composition and the workings of your bodies. You are your personalities, your cultures.

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

She learned quickly that it was not good to be too different. Great differences caused envy, suspicion, fear, charges of witchcraft.

There are so many interesting times we could have visited.

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

Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

His mistake was in seeing her as a young girl. She was already a missile, armed and targeted.

There must be good marriages somewhere, but to me, marriage had the feel of people tolerating each other, enduring each other because they were afraid to be alone or because each was a habit that the other couldn't quite break.

Yes," he said, "intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike.

Intelligence is relatively new to life on Earth, but your hierarchical tendencies are ancient.

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair.

Here we are— Energy, Mass, Life, Shaping life, Mind, Shaping Mind, God, Shaping God. Consider— We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.

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.

In small communities, she believed, people are more accountable to one another. Serious misbehavior is harder to get away with, harder even to begin when everyone who sees you knows who you are, where you live, who your family is, and whether you have any business doing what you're doing.

What are you?" I whispered."What are we to you?" She lay still, rested her head on her topmost coil. "You know me as no other does," she said softly. "You must decide.

Was an eternity of absolute ease just another name for hell?

After a few years of watching the human species make things unnecessarily difficult for itself I have little hope that it will do anything more than survive and continue its cycle of errors.

It scares me how many things I've got to learn. How will I learn them?

Purpose Unifies us: It focuses our dreams, Guides our plans, Strengthens our efforts. Purpose Defines us, Shapes us, And offers us Greatness.

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? Well