339 Quotes by Octavia E. Butler

A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you’ve captured us, and we can’t escape. But you’re more than only the composition and the workings of your bodies. You are your personalities, your cultures.

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. It is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.

All struggles Are essentially power struggles. Who will rule, Who will lead, Who will define, refine, confine, design, Who will dominate. All struggles Are essentially power struggles, And most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.

He’s had notable success with this carrot-and-stick approach. Join us and thrive, or whatever happens to you as a result of your own sinful stubbornness is your problem.

There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair.

That educated didn’t mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.

I’m trying to speak – to write-the truth. I”m trying to be clear. I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.

She learned quickly that it was not good to be too different. Great differences caused envy, suspicion, fear, charges of witchcraft.

Clay was slowly deciding to kill himself. It was slow because, in spite of everything Clay did not want to die. He was just becoming less and less able to tolerate the pain of living.