Top 200 Octavia E. Butler Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough. Then we go on to create super-people – super-parents, super-kings, and queens, super-cops – to be our gods and to look after us – to stand between us and God. Yet God has been here all along, shaping us and being shaped by us in no particular way or in too many ways at once like an amoeba – or like a cancer. Chaos.”

— Octavia E. Butler

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what “everyone” is saying, doing thinking – whoever “everyone” happens to be this year.”

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

111. “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

112. “I imagined the United States becoming, slowly, through the combined effects of lack of foresight and short-term unenlightened self-interest, a third world country.”

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

115. “I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”

— Octavia E. Butler

116. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

118. “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

119. “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

120. “Worship is no good without action. With action, it’s only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, and eases your mind.”

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

122. “Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.”

— Octavia E. Butler

123. “Help us to make America great again.”

— Octavia E. Butler

124. “It’s too easy to follow bad but attractive leaders, embrace pleasurable but destructive habits, ignore looming disaster because maybe it won’t happen after all – or maybe it will only happen to other people. That kind of thinking is part of what it means to be adolescent.”

— Octavia E. Butler

125. “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, 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

126. “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

127. “It scares me how many things I’ve got to learn. How will I learn them?”

— Octavia E. Butler

128. “Yes,” he said, “intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter.”

— Octavia E. Butler

129. “Human competitiveness and territoriality were often at the root of particularly horrible fashions in oppression.”

— Octavia E. Butler

130. “People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn’t bother me. It’s other people doing the calling that bothers me.”

— Octavia E. Butler

131. “We can, Each of us, Do the impossible As Long as we can convince ourselves That it has been done before.”

— Octavia E. Butler

132. “Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!” She.”

— Octavia E. Butler

133. “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.”

— Octavia E. Butler

134. “Your body said one thing. Your words said another.” It moved a sensory arm to the back of his neck, looping one coil loosely around his neck. “This is the position,” it said. “I’ll stop now if you like.”

— Octavia E. Butler

135. “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.”

— Octavia E. Butler

136. “We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.”

— Octavia E. Butler

137. “That’s what Humans are, too, don’t forget. People who poison each other, then disclaim all responsibility.”

— Octavia E. Butler

138. “There must be good marriages somewhere, but to me, marriage had the feel of people tolerating each other, enduring each other because they were afraid to be alone or because each was a habit that the other couldn’t quite break.”

— Octavia E. Butler

139. “God is Change And hidden within Change Is surprise, delight, Confusion, pain, Discovery, loss, Opportunity, and growth. As always, God exists To shape And to be shaped.”

— Octavia E. Butler

140. “He led the way past the main house away from the slave cabins and other buildings, away from the small slave children who chased each other and shouted and didn’t understand yet that they were slaves.”

— Octavia E. Butler

141. “The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. Crazy as they are, crazy as she was, they must.”

— Octavia E. Butler

142. “Earthseed deals with ongoing reality, not with supernatural authority figures. Worship is no good without action. With action, it’s only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, eases your mind.”

— Octavia E. Butler

143. “There are so many interesting times we could have visited.”

— Octavia E. Butler

144. “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

145. “How could sane people like the ones he had left behind in Phoenix do such a thing – or, how could they let insane people gain control of devices that could do so much harm? If you knew a man was out of his mind, you restrained him. You didn’t give him power.”

— Octavia E. Butler

146. “A victim of God may, Through learning adaption, Become a partner of God, A victim of God may, Through forethought and planning, Become a shaper of God. Or a victim of God may, Through shortsightedness and fear, Remain God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey.”

— Octavia E. Butler

147. “Most people have given up on politicians. After all, politicians have been promising to return us to the glory, wealth, and order of the twentieth century ever since I can remember.”

— Octavia E. Butler

148. “Learn everything you can from these people, and bring what you learn back to the rest of us. Even the stupid, ugly things that they say and do might be important. Their lying promises might hide a truth. If we collect what we see and hear, if we stay united, work together, support one another, then the time will come when we can win our freedom or kill them or both!”

— Octavia E. Butler

149. “Se sono tuoi, stabilisci tu le regole. A chi importa che cosa ne pensano i giocattoli? Spazza via l’intera famiglia di un giocattolo, poi dagliene una nuova. I bambini giocattolo, come i figli di Giobbe, sono intercambiabili.”

— Octavia E. Butler

150. “You aren’t flawed. I noticed even before I went to my parents that there was a wholeness to you – a strong wholeness. I don’t know whether you’ll be what your parents wanted you to be, but whatever you become, you’ll be complete. You’ll have within yourself everything you need to content yourself. Just follow what seems right to you.”

— Octavia E. Butler