Octavia E. Butler Quotes

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.

:And again and again

:::by all that the coward fears.

We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way things always have been.

:Because we’ve said it

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

A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of superperson. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.

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

:That we’ve embraced and defended

Life was treasure. The only treasure.

When vision fails
Direction is lost. When direction is lost
Purpose may be forgotten. When purpose if forgotten
Emotion rules alone. When emotion rules alone,
Destruction...destruction.

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 was in classes sometimes where I was the only Black person and tend to either get ignored or get petted on the head a lot. Neither is in the slightest useful so I was eager to get away from that and Harlan was not interested in doing either. (1994)

I did not read any Langston Hughes until I was an adult, but I remember being carried away by him and Gwendolyn Brooks. When I was growing up, the only blacks you came across in school were slaves-who were always well treated-and later, when we got to individuals, Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. Booker T. Washington started a college, and Carver did something with peanuts; we never knew what. We did not read anything by a black writer except [James Weldon] Johnson's The Creation, and that was in high school. We managed to get through adolescence without being introduced to any black culture. (1996)

They can create something beautiful, useful, even something worthless. But they create. They don't destroy.