Top 200 Octavia E. Butler Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough.”

— Octavia E. Butler

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

56. “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

57. “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

58. “Belief will not save you. Only actions Guided and shaped By belief and knowledge Will save you. Belief Initiates and guides action – Or it does nothing.”

— Octavia E. Butler

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism.”

— Octavia E. Butler

64. “It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It’s harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching.”

— Octavia E. Butler

65. “Grief hit like that. Something would remind us of the past, of home, of a person, and then we would remember that it was all gone. The person was dead or probably dead. Everything we’d known and treasured was gone.”

— Octavia E. Butler

66. “She had learned to keep her sanity by accepting things as she found them, adapting herself to new circumstances by putting aside the old ones whose memories might overwhelm her. She.”

— Octavia E. Butler

67. “God is neither good nor evil, neither loving nor hating. God is Power. God is Change. We must find the rest of what we need within ourselves, in one another, in our Destiny.”

— Octavia E. Butler

68. “Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it.”

— Octavia E. Butler

69. “She was strange now, erratic, sometimes needing my friendship, trusting me with her dangerous longings for freedom, her wild plans to run away again; and sometimes hating me, blaming me for her trouble. One.”

— Octavia E. Butler

70. “Human beings fear difference,” Lilith had told him once. “Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization.”

— Octavia E. Butler

71. “Human beings are more alike than different – damn sure more alike than we like to admit. I wonder if the same thing wouldn’t have happened eventually, no matter which two cultures gained the ability to wipe one another out along with the rest of the world.” Lilith.”

— Octavia E. Butler

72. “Here we are – Energy, Mass, Life, Shaping life, Mind, Shaping Mind, God, Shaping God. Consider – We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.”

— Octavia E. Butler

73. “You want to know how moral she is?” His tone made me frown. “What do you mean?” “If she chases me any harder, she and I will wind up playing a scene from that Bible she reads. The scene between Potiphar’s wife and Joseph.”

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

76. “I don’t like most Utopia stories because I don’t believe them for a moment. It seems inevitable that my Utopia would be someone else’s hell.”

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

78. “When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.”

— Octavia E. Butler

79. “That’s history. It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

— Octavia E. Butler

80. “We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way things always have been.”

— Octavia E. Butler

81. “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.”

— Octavia E. Butler

82. “I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.”

— Octavia E. Butler

83. “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.”

— Octavia E. Butler

84. “Down on Earth,” she said carefully, “there are no people left to draw lines on maps and say which sides of those lines are the right sides. There is no government left. No human government, anyway.”

— Octavia E. Butler

85. “To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.”

— Octavia E. Butler

86. “As habit is more dependable than inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than talent.”

— Octavia E. Butler

87. “Could she give Doro what he wanted – what she herself had wanted for so long – children who would not die?”

— Octavia E. Butler

88. “Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant.”

— Octavia E. Butler

89. “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.”

— Octavia E. Butler

90. “The Human Contradiction held them. Intelligence at the service of hierarchical behavior. They were not free.”

— Octavia E. Butler

91. “So I preached from Luke, chapter eighteen, verses one through eight: the parable of the importunate widow. It’s one I’ve always liked. A widow is so persistent in her demands for justice that she overcomes the resistance of a judge who fears neither God nor man. She wears him down. Moral: The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary.”

— Octavia E. Butler

92. “When it comes to strangers with guns,” I told her, “I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust.” She.”

— Octavia E. Butler

93. “Consider: Whether you’re a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true. All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.”

— Octavia E. Butler

94. “And what? You think it’s going to get sane? It’s never been sane. You just have to go ahead and live, no matter what.” I didn’t know what to say, so I kissed.”

— Octavia E. Butler

95. “You do everything they tell you,” she wept, “and they still treat you like a old dog. Go here, open your legs; go there, bust your back. What they care! I ain’t s’pose to have no feelin’s!”

— Octavia E. Butler

96. “We’ll have to be very careful how we allow our needs to shape us.”

— Octavia E. Butler

97. “Read every day and learn from what you read.”

— Octavia E. Butler

98. “Was an eternity of absolute ease just another name for hell?”

— Octavia E. Butler

99. “If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.”

— Octavia E. Butler

100. “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.”

— Octavia E. Butler