Top 200 Octavia E. Butler Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “She jumps on me for sharing pain with the living, but she tries to share it with the dead.”

— Octavia E. Butler

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

87. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

91. “You can’t come back all at once any more than you can leave all at once. It takes time. After a while, though, things will fall into place.”

— Octavia E. Butler

92. “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

93. “Stumbling across the truth isn’t the same as making things up.”

— Octavia E. Butler

94. “Humans had evolved from hierarchical life, dominating, often killing other life. Oankali had evolved from acquisitive life, collecting and combining with other life. To kill was not simply wasteful to the Oankali. It was as unacceptable as slicing off their own healthy limbs.”

— Octavia E. Butler

95. “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

96. “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.”

— Octavia E. Butler

97. “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

98. “Beware: Ignorance Protects itself. Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed. Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.”

— Octavia E. Butler

99. “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

100. “Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of “heathen houses of devil-worship,” he has a simple answer: “Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.” He’s had notable success with this carrot-and-stick approach.”

— Octavia E. Butler