Top 200 Octavia E. Butler Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Octavia E. Butler

2. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

5. “Seize change. Use it. Adapt and grow.”

— Octavia E. Butler

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

10. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— 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. “Yes,” he said, “intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.”

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

16. “I began writing about power because I had so little.”

— Octavia E. Butler

17. “Science fiction,” Butler writes, “has long treated people who might or might not exist – extraterrestrials. Unfortunately, however, many of the same science-fiction writers who started us thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life did nothing to make us think about here-at-home human variation.”

— Octavia E. Butler

18. “It’s amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.”

— Octavia E. Butler

19. “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

20. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

22. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

24. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

27. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

30. “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

31. “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

32. “There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. If there weren’t, the cycles wouldn’t keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make.”

— Octavia E. Butler

33. “The Self must create Its own reasons for being. To shape God, Shape Self.”

— Octavia E. Butler

34. “To benefit your world, Your people, Your life, Consider consequences, Minimize harm Ask questions, Seek answers, Learn, Teach.”

— Octavia E. Butler

35. “Then, finally, true success. Isaac.”

— Octavia E. Butler

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “God is Infinite, Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent. God is Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay – God is Change. Beware: God exists to shape And to be shaped.”

— Octavia E. Butler

47. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

49. “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

50. “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