339 Quotes by Octavia E. Butler

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn’t bother me. It’s other people doing the calling that bothers me.

She jumps on me for sharing pain with the living, but she tries to share it with the dead.

The stars are free.” She shrugs. “I’d rather have the city lights back myself, the sooner the better. But we can afford the stars.

Kevin, you don’t have to beat people to treat them brutally.

Intelligence is relatively new to life on Earth, but your hierarchical tendencies are ancient.

God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But God exists to be shaped. It isn’t enough for us to just survive, limping along, playing business as usual while things get worse and worse. If that’s the shape we give to God, then someday we must become too weak – too poor, too hungry, too sick – to defend ourselves. Then we’ll be wiped out.

I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.

It scares me how many things I’ve got to learn. How will I learn them?

Time passed. Kevin and I became more a part of the household, familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize.