Octavia E. Butler Quotes

It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them.

A tree
Cannot grow
In its parents’ shadows.

You're truly free for the first time. What could be more difficult than that?

Most vampires, I’ve discovered, are men, for some reason. I guess it’s because Dracula, people are kind of feeding off that.

We’ve also been laughed at, argued with, booed, and threatened with hellfire—or gunfire. But Jarret’s kind of religion and Jarret himself are getting less and less popular these days. Both, it seems, are bad for business, bad for the U. S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they’ve just made others very angry.

Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.

Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.

Now I have been raped.
It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.

Slavery was a long slow process of dulling. (p183)

I want to write about what's going to happen if we keep doing what we've been doing, if we keep recklessly endangering the environment, if we keep paying no attention to economic realities, if we keep paying no attention to educational needs, if we keep doing a lot of the things that are hurting us now. And that's what I wound up writing about. And everything else just kind of fell into it, fell into place.

He showed me his fantastic library first, and that helped me warm to him a little. A guy with a room like that in his house couldn’t be all bad.

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.

“It was an old passion,” he said. “I haven’t touched a violin for months. I didn’t know what that would be like.”
“What is it like?” she asked.
He began to walk so that she almost missed his answer. “An amputation,” he whispered.

Sometimes I write to keep from going crazy. There’s a world of things I don’t feel free to talk to anyone about.

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.