Octavia E Butler Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Octavia E Butler
Octavia E Butler Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Octavia E Butler quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
We're an adaptable species," she said, refusing to be stopped, "but it's wrong to inflict suffering just because your victim can endure it." "Learn
— Octavia E. Butler
Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.
— Octavia E. Butler
Here we are - Energy, Mass, Life, Shaping life, Mind, Shaping Mind, God, Shaping God. Consider - We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.
— Octavia E. Butler
There are so many interesting times we could have visited.
— Octavia E. Butler
A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.
— Octavia E. Butler
People do blame you for the things they do to you.
— Octavia E. Butler
Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
— Octavia E. Butler
My characters hope for better lives.
— Octavia E. Butler
Could a creature who had to look upon ordinary people literally as food and shelter ever understand how strongly those people valued life?
— Octavia E. Butler
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
— Octavia E. Butler
I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.
— Octavia E. Butler
I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
— Octavia E. Butler
She means the devil with people who say you're anything but what you are.
— Octavia E. Butler
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.
— Octavia E. Butler
Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.
— Octavia E. Butler
There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair.
— Octavia E. Butler
Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights.
— Octavia E. Butler
Did she struggle for life only out of habit, or because some part of her still hoped that there was something worth living for?
— Octavia E. Butler
Kindness eases changeLove quiets fear — Octavia E. Butler
If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?
— Octavia E. Butler
Let go of me." It smoothed its tentacles again. "Be grateful, Joe. I'm not going to let go of you.
— Octavia E. Butler
Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
— Octavia E. Butler
Read every day and learn from what you read.
— Octavia E. Butler
Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again." He
— Octavia E. Butler
Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person's resolve.
— Octavia E. Butler
My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.
— Octavia E. Butler
I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.
— Octavia E. Butler
He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.
— Octavia E. Butler
Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.
— Octavia E. Butler
Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.
— Octavia E. Butler
I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.
— Octavia E. Butler
You are a good man," she had observed contentedly. "And it has been too long since I had this." He was surprised
— Octavia E. Butler
In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.
— Octavia E. Butler
People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.
— Octavia E. Butler
I'm a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, ... an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.
— Octavia E. Butler
The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. Crazy as they are, crazy as she was, they must
— Octavia E. Butler
She glanced at him. "What gods do you respect?" "None." "And why not?" "I help myself," he said.
— Octavia E. Butler
Bloodchild" is my pregnant man story.
— Octavia E. Butler
I had novels to write, so I wrote them.
— Octavia E. Butler
She jumps on me for sharing pain with the living, but she tries to share it with the dead.
— Octavia E. Butler
Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn't say them, couldn't sort out my feelings about them, couldn't keep them bottled inside me.
— Octavia E. Butler
All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.
— Octavia E. Butler
Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.
— Octavia E. Butler
Could she give Doro what he wanted - what she herself had wanted for so long - children who would not die?
— Octavia E. Butler
Everything is so soft here,' he said, 'so easy...' 'I know
— Octavia E. Butler
I'm not pessimistic about much of anything.
— Octavia E. Butler
Too many writers get into that gross-'em-out factor.
— Octavia E. Butler
to be aware of a place where blackness was not a mark of slavery.
— Octavia E. Butler
Power came the way a child came -- with agony.
— Octavia E. Butler
Freedom is dangerous but it's precious, too. You can't just throw it away or let it slip away. You can't sell it for bread and pottage.
— Octavia E. Butler
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
— Octavia E. Butler
I'm very happy alone.
— Octavia E. Butler
why can't I do what others have done - ignore the obvious. Live a normal life. It's hard enough just to do that in this world.
— Octavia E. Butler
I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.
— Octavia E. Butler
Sensible. Conservative and sensible and mature and *wrong*. Very much in character with Joanne.
— Octavia E. Butler
Too. A woman should have something of her own. Doro
— Octavia E. Butler
I lost an arm on my last trip home.
— Octavia E. Butler
I'm sorry that astronaut will be brought back from her own chosen heaven.
— Octavia E. Butler
I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.
— Octavia E. Butler
Akin rested his chin on Iriarte's shoulder and savored the strange pale scents - all pale now.
— Octavia E. Butler
Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.
— Octavia E. Butler
Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.
— Octavia E. Butler
He rubbed his head again. 'Five years is longer than it sounds. So much longer.
— Octavia E. Butler
The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind ...
— Octavia E. Butler
Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of "wrong" ideas.
— Octavia E. Butler
Intelligence is relatively new to life on Earth, but your hierarchical tendencies are ancient.
— Octavia E. Butler
That which could hunger, could starve.
— Octavia E. Butler
How dull it is to have people defining you.
— Octavia E. Butler
You controlled both animals and people by controlling their reproduction - controlling it absolutely.
— Octavia E. Butler
Yes," he said, "intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn't matter.
— Octavia E. Butler
I don't know how much of a market there is for space opera. Just because it's in the movies doesn't mean magazines are buying it.
— Octavia E. Butler
I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.
— Octavia E. Butler
We can,Each of us,
Do the impossible
As long as we can convince ourselves
That it has been done before. — Octavia E. Butler
There is no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you.
— Octavia E. Butler
Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it.
— Octavia E. Butler
When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.
— Octavia E. Butler
We are a naturally hierarchical species.
— Octavia E. Butler
When it comes to strangers with guns," I told her, "I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust." She
— Octavia E. Butler
Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
— Octavia E. Butler
Shyness is shit. It isn't cute or feminine or appealing. It's torment, and it's shit.
— Octavia E. Butler
Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant.
— Octavia E. Butler
Gather information. Seek weakness. Watch, wait, and do what you have to to stay alive!
— Octavia E. Butler
She learned quickly that it was not good to be too different. Great differences caused envy, suspicion, fear, charges of witchcraft.
— Octavia E. Butler
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.
— Octavia E. Butler
Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.
— Octavia E. Butler
I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
— Octavia E. Butler
My God doesn't love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.
— Octavia E. Butler
The big talent is persistence.
— Octavia E. Butler
To get along with God,Consider the consequences of your behavior.
Earthseed: The Books of the Living — Octavia E. Butler
Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
— Octavia E. Butler
As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else's trouble.
— Octavia E. Butler
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.
— Octavia E. Butler
I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.
— Octavia E. Butler
Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.
— Octavia E. Butler
Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
— Octavia E. Butler
We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough.
— Octavia E. Butler
Daddy's the only man I know," he said softly, "who cares as much about giving his word to a black as to a white.
— Octavia E. Butler
Science fiction is not formulaic.
— Octavia E. Butler
Worship is no good without action. With action, it's only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, and eases your mind
— Octavia E. Butler
Would you like a tuna-salad sandwich?''Yes,' God said. 'Thank you. — Octavia E. Butler