Octavia E. Butler Quotes

People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back’

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

A victim of God may,
Through learning adaption,
Become a partner of God,
A victim of God may,
Through forethought and planning,
Become a shaper of God.
Or a victim of God may,
Through shortsightedness and fear,
Remain God’s victim,
God’s plaything,
God’s prey.

Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.

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

People here in the neighborhood are saying she had no business going to Mars, anyway. All that money wasted on another crazy space trip when so many people here on earth can’t afford water, food, or shelter

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.

Humans were genetically inclined to be intolerant of difference. They could overcome the inclination, but it was a reality of the Human conflict that they often did not.

Tomas stopped and looked at the three Oankali. “Do you believe in spirits?”
“We believe in life,” Ahajas said.
“Life after death?”
Ahajas smoothed her tentacles briefly in agreement. “When I’m dead,” she said, “I will nourish other life.”
“But I mean—”
“If I died on a lifeless world, a world that could sustain some form of life if it were tenacious enough, organelles within each cell of my body would survive and evolve. In perhaps a thousand million years, that world would be as full of life as this one.”
“...it would?”
“Yes. Our ancestors have seeded a great many barren worlds that way. Nothing is more tenacious than the life we are made of. A world of life from apparent death, from dissolution. That’s what we believe in.”
“Nothing more?”
Ahajas became smooth enough with amusement to reflect firelight. “No, Lelka. Nothing more.”

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

Life was treasure. The only treasure.

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.

Yori, Human purpose isn't what you say it is or what I say it is. It's what your biology says it is—what your genes say it is.

He thought about that for a moment, wondered what he should say. The truth or nothing. The truth.