Octavia E. Butler Quotes
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If you don’t care about my people, why should I care about yours?
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Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.
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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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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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Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave.
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Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
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Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
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We give our deadTo the orchardsAnd the groves.We give our deadTo life.
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He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.
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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.'
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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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Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about.
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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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'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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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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'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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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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The Destiny of EarthseedIs to take root among the stars.
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I’m literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.
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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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Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.
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'From what I’ve read,' I said to him, 'the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is to survive until it goes sane again.'
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Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.
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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.