Top 200 Octavia E. Butler Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

113. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

115. “In small communities, she believed, people are more accountable to one another. Serious misbehavior is harder to get away with, harder even to begin when everyone who sees you knows who you are, where you live, who your family is, and whether you have any business doing what you’re doing.”

— Octavia E. Butler

116. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

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

— Octavia E. Butler

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

126. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

128. “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

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

— Octavia E. Butler

130. “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

131. “We are a harvest of survivors.”

— Octavia E. Butler

132. “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

133. “Most Humans lose access to old memories as they acquire new ones. They know how to speak, for instance, but they don’t recall learning to speak. They keep what experience has taught them – usually – but lose the experience itself. We.”

— Octavia E. Butler

134. “You controlled both animals and people by controlling their reproduction – controlling it absolutely.”

— Octavia E. Butler

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “It was literally the best food she had tasted in two hundred and fifty years.”

— Octavia E. Butler

141. “For Lilith, it was a comfortable, mindless activity that gave her something to do when there was nothing she could do about her situation.”

— Octavia E. Butler

142. “Good stories are good stories, no matter how they’re categorized.”

— Octavia E. Butler

143. “Let go of me.” It smoothed its tentacles again. “Be grateful, Joe. I’m not going to let go of you.”

— Octavia E. Butler

144. “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

145. “Power came the way a child came – with agony.”

— Octavia E. Butler

146. “When I was older, I decided that getting a rejection slip was like being told your child was ugly. You got mad and didn’t believe a word of it. Besides, look at all the really ugly literary children out there in the world being published and doing fine!”

— Octavia E. Butler

147. “Akin rested his chin on Iriarte’s shoulder and savored the strange pale scents – all pale now.”

— Octavia E. Butler

148. “Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.”

— Octavia E. Butler

149. “There are times when I wish I believed in hell – other than the hells we make for one another, I mean.”

— Octavia E. Butler

150. “I might not have believed this if a Human had said it. 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. And once we did understand them, the Humans got angry and acted as though we had stolen thoughts from their minds.”

— Octavia E. Butler