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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Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
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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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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 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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Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about.
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When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.
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He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.
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We give our deadTo the orchardsAnd the groves.We give our deadTo life.
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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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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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Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.
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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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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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'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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'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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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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I’m literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.
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If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it.
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A treeCannot growIn its parents’ shadows.
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There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.