Octavia E. Butler Quotes

American science fiction writer (1947-2006)

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Octavia E. Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer, one of the very few African-American women in the field.

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Birth Name: Octavia Estelle Butler

Alternative Names: Octavia Butler

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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.”

I'll tell you," she said softly. "But you won't like it."
He looked away from her. "I asked for the truth. Whether I like it or not, I have to know.

Human beings fear difference," Lilith had told him once. "Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don't understand this, you will. You'll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior." And she had put her hand on his hair. "When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference.

All struggles
Are essentially
Power struggles.
Who will rule,
Who will lead,
Who will define,
refine,
confine,
design,
Who will dominate.
All struggles
Are essentially
Power struggles, And most
are no more intellectual
than two rams
knocking their heads together.

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.

It's a crucifix," Wright told me when I showed it to him. "It must have been worn by one of the people who lived here. Or maybe the arsonist lost it." He gave a humorless smile. "You never know who's liable to turn out to be religious.

What we’re permitted to see.

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.

All that you touch
You Change. All that you Change
Changes you. The only lasting truth
Is Change. God
Is Change.

We can see that our Councils aren’t games like the tribunals humans have. The work of a Council of Judgment is to learn the truth and then decide what to do about it within our law. It isn’t about following laws so strictly that the guilty go unpunished or the innocent are made to suffer. It isn’t about protecting everyone’s rights. It’s about finding the truth, period, and then deciding what to do about it.

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.

“He had guns,” Celia said. “Iosif didn’t like guns, but Stefan did.”
It hadn’t helped him survive.

Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.

Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter.

She found more gratification in teaching one willing student than a dozen resentful ones.