Octavia E. Butler Quotes

She glanced at him. “What gods do you respect?”
“None.”
“And why not?”
“I help myself,” he said.

She was too alert, too alive not to have the kind of mind that probed and reached and got her into trouble now and then.

Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave.

I got up to leave. There was nothing more to be said. He had asked for what he knew I could not give, and I had refused.

"There're are worse things than being dead." (p253)

Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have.

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.”

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

“He’s a fair man.”
I looked at him, startled.
“I said fair,” he repeated. “Not likable.”
I kept quiet. His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.

There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one. (p124)

Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about.

I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. (beginning of Prologue)

A pet. In pets, free will was tolerated only as long as the pet owner found it amusing.

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.

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.