Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.
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I can’t do it, Joachim. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. A long leash is still a leash. And Coransee will still be at the other end of it, holding on.
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I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
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A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of superperson. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.
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I'm not pessimistic about much of anything.
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With a disaster like global warming, it's too late to worry about when it's looming except to figure out how to adapt to it.
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So he had locked her in the closet. Some of his people, ignorant and fearful, could not quite believe her illness was not contagious. Badger locked her away from them for her own safety. She had seen for herself how eager they were to get her out of their sight.
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He showed me his fantastic library first, and that helped me warm to him a little. A guy with a room like that in his house couldn’t be all bad.
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The big talent is persistence.
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If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?
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'I’m not a demagogue.''That’s too bad. That leaves the field to people who are demagogues-to the Jarrets of the world. And there have always been Jarrets. Probably there always will be.'
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We are a naturally hierarchical species.
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How dull it is to have people defining you.
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Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.
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Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.
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I'm comfortably asocial - a hermit in the middle of a large city, a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive.
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All that you touchYou Change. All that you ChangeChanges you. The only lasting truthIs Change. GodIs Change.
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Not everyone has been a bully or the victim of bullies, but everyone has seen bullying, and seeing it, has responded to it by joining in or objecting, by laughing or keeping silent, by feeling disgusted or feeling interested.
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I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
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I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.
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Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
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At school I was always taller than the rest of my class, and because I was an only child, I was comfortable with adults but shy and awkward with other kids. I was quiet, bookish, and in spite of my size, hopeless at sports. In short, I was different. And even in the earliest grades, I got pounded for it.
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Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.
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He was surprised when I ignored him. He is wealthy and arrogant and used to being listened to even when what he says is nonsense-as it often is.