Top 160 Octavia E. Butler Quotes (2023 Update)

1. “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”

— Octavia E. Butler

2. “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”

— Octavia E. Butler

3. “Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change – Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving – forever Changing. The universe is God’s self-portrait.”

— Octavia E. Butler

4. “Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery. I.”

— Octavia E. Butler

5. “The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one’s own place, One’s own people, One’s own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise – Into growth and destruction, Into solitude and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.”

— Octavia E. Butler

6. “All successful life is Adaptable, Opportunistic, Tenacious, Interconnected, and Fecund. Understand this. Use it. Shape God.”

— Octavia E. Butler

7. “Death Is a great Change – Is life’s greatest Change. We honor our beloved dead. As we mix their essence with the earth, We remember them, And within us, They live.”

— Octavia E. Butler

8. “Embrace diversity. Unite – Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity Or be destroyed.”

— Octavia E. Butler

9. “A tree Cannot grow In its parents’ shadows.”

— Octavia E. Butler

10. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”

— Octavia E. Butler

11. “The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren’t any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.”

— Octavia E. Butler

12. “First learning, then proving I’d learned. Knowing and using the knowledge aren’t the same thing.”

— Octavia E. Butler

13. “We human beings seem always to have found it comforting to have someone to look down on – a bottom level of fellow creatures who are very vulnerable, but who can somehow be blamed and punished for all or any troubles. We need this lowest class as much as we need equals to team with and to compete against and superiors to look to for direction and help.”

— Octavia E. Butler

14. “People do blame you for the things they do to you.”

— Octavia E. Butler

15. “PRODIGY IS, AT ITS essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.”

— Octavia E. Butler

16. “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”

— Octavia E. Butler

17. “I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.”

— Octavia E. Butler

18. “But if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain?”

— Octavia E. Butler

19. “But tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. I thought of Alice, and then of Rufus, and I realized that Rufus had done exactly what I had said he would do: Gotten possession of the woman without having to bother with her husband. Now, somehow, Alice would have to accept not only the loss of her husband, but her own enslavement. Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. It made no sense. No matter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense. I.”

— Octavia E. Butler

20. “They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.”

— Octavia E. Butler

21. “She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn’t kill, but she seemed to die a little.”

— Octavia E. Butler

22. “Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn’t say them, couldn’t sort out my feelings about them, couldn’t keep them bottled inside me.”

— Octavia E. Butler

23. “Daddy’s the only man I know,” he said softly, “who cares as much about giving his word to a black as to a white.”

— Octavia E. Butler

24. “As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else’s trouble.”

— Octavia E. Butler

25. “She means it doesn’t come off, Dana... The black. She means the devil with people who say you’re anything but what you are.”

— Octavia E. Butler

26. “I could accept him as my ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover. He had understood that once.”

— Octavia E. Butler

27. “Why is the universe? To shape God. Why is God? To shape the universe. I can’t get rid of it. I’ve tried to change it or dump it, but I can’t. I cannot. It feels like the truest thing I’ve ever written. It’s as mysterious and as obvious as any other explanation of God or the universe that I’ve ever read, except that to me the others feel inadequate, at best.”

— Octavia E. Butler

28. “Frankly, it never occurred to me that I needed someone who looked like me to show me the way. I was ignorant and arrogant and persistent and the writing left me no choice at all.”9.”

— Octavia E. Butler

29. “The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary.”

— Octavia E. Butler

30. “People are setting fires to get rid of whomever they dislike from personal enemies to anyone who looks or sounds foreign or racially different. People are setting fires because they’re frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.”

— Octavia E. Butler

31. “God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But there’s hope in understanding the nature of God – not punishing or jealous, but infinitely malleable. There’s comfort in realizing that everyone and everything yields to God. There’s power in knowing that God can be focused, diverted, shaped by anyone at all. But there’s no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you. You know that.”

— Octavia E. Butler

32. “Why is the universe? To shape God. Why is God? To shape the universe.”

— Octavia E. Butler

33. “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.”

— Octavia E. Butler

34. “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.”

— Octavia E. Butler

35. “God is not to be prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that persons resolve.”

— Octavia E. Butler

36. “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.”

— Octavia E. Butler

37. “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.”

— Octavia E. Butler

38. “Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.”

— Octavia E. Butler

39. “That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”

— Octavia E. Butler

40. “We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough.”

— Octavia E. Butler

41. “There is no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you.”

— Octavia E. Butler

42. “Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.”

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

44. “I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.”

— Octavia E. Butler

45. “This could be a great time to live in,” Kevin said once. “I keep thinking what an experience it would be to stay in it – go West and watch the building of the country, see how much of the Old West mythology is true.”

— Octavia E. Butler

46. “Mars is a rock – cold, empty, almost airless, dead. Yet it’s heaven in a way. We can see it in the night sky, a whole other world, but too nearby, too close within the reach of the people who’ve made such a hell of life here on Earth.”

— Octavia E. Butler

47. “Thus, when her enemies came to kill her, she knew more about surviving than they did about killing. And.”

— Octavia E. Butler

48. “My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.”

— Octavia E. Butler

49. “He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.”

— Octavia E. Butler

50. “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.”

— Octavia E. Butler