Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
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Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave.
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He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.
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If there's any single talent a writer needs, it's persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.
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When I meet a woman who attracts me, I prefer women,' she said. 'And when I meet a man who attracts me, I prefer men.' 'You mean you haven't made up your mind yet.' 'I mean exactly what I said. I told you you wouldn't like it. Most people who ask want me definitely on one side or the other.
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I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.
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Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have.
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The essentials are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.
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'What will they do when they have only the herbs' he asked her.'Live or die as best they can,' she said. 'Everything truly alive dies sooner or later.'
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A pet. In pets, free will was tolerated only as long as the pet owner found it amusing.
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Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about.
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Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
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We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.So much agony caused, so much evil done in God’s name.
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We give our deadTo the orchardsAnd the groves.We give our deadTo life.
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Jarrett would be easier to take if he cared half as much about children’s bodies and minds as he pretends to care about their souls.
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I’m literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.
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I might not have believed this if a Human had said it. Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everybody had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant.
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Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.
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'When it comes to strangers with guns,' I told her, 'I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust.'
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A treeCannot growIn its parents’ shadows.
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If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it.
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I think climbing mountains or buildings or whatever has been a really good metaphor for finishing my work. Because no matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can't possibly do this, somehow you do.
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They had clearly feared turn-of-the-century irrationality-religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological intolerance and corporate greed.
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He didn’t look all right to me. 'Has anyone gone for the doctor?''Marse Tom don’t hardly get Doc West for ague. He says all the doc knows is bleeding and blistering and purging and puking and making folks sicker than they was to start.'