Top 200 Octavia E. Butler Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “The problem, of course, with throwing people away is that they don’t go away. They stay in the society that turned its back on them. And whether that society likes it or not, they find all sorts of things to do.”

— Octavia E. Butler

202. “I would like to give them a grove of oak trees, I said. Trees are better than stone- life commemorating life.”

— Octavia E. Butler

203. “Human purpose isn’t what you say it is or what I say it is. It’s what your biology says it is – what your genes say it is.”

— Octavia E. Butler

204. “They’re both afraid. They look at their children – Alan has four kids, too – and they’re afraid and ashamed of their fear, ashamed of their powerlessness. And they’re tired. There are millions of people like them – people who are frightened and just plain tired of all the chaos. They want someone to do something. Fix things. Now!”

— Octavia E. Butler

205. “Then show me what you are. Give me the trust you ask me to give you.”

— Octavia E. Butler

206. “I saw a woman die in childbirth once,” he said. I nodded. “I never saw it, but I kept hearing about it happening. It was pretty common back then, I guess. Poor medical care or none at all.” “No, medical care had nothing to do with the case I saw. This woman’s master strung her up by her wrists and beat her until the baby came out of her – dropped onto the ground.”

— Octavia E. Butler

207. “I found that I couldn’t muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. I thought the best we could all do was to look after one another and clean up the various hells we’ve made right here on earth.”

— Octavia E. Butler

208. “Once people get the idea that it’s all right to take what you want and destroy the rest, who knows when they’ll stop.”

— Octavia E. Butler

209. “But those dedicated to other religions, and those who are not religious at all sneer at Jarret and call him a hypocrite. They sneer, they hate him, but they also fear him. They see him for the tyrant that he is. And the thugs see him as one of them. They envy him. He is the bigger, the more successful thief, murderer, and slaver.”

— Octavia E. Butler

210. “In spite of your loss and pain, you aren’t alone. You still have people who care about you and want you to be all right. You still have family.”

— Octavia E. Butler

211. “How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tormented – reeducated – before it begins to matter to the majority of Americans? How does this penning people up look to other countries? Do they know? Would they care? There are worse things happening here in the States and elsewhere, I know.”

— Octavia E. Butler

212. “These days, projecting blame is almost an art form.”

— Octavia E. Butler

213. “Pleasure is rare, pain is plentiful, and, delusional or not, it hurts like hell.”

— Octavia E. Butler

214. “The bed was what it had always been: a solid platform that gave slightly to the touch and that seemed to grow from the floor.”

— Octavia E. Butler

215. “These were God’s people come to bring the true faith to the cultist heathens. I suppose if some of the heathens died of it, that wasn’t really very important.”

— Octavia E. Butler

216. “It has told us about you,” Ahajas said as they carried Nikanj down to the lower corridors. Kahguyaht preceded them, opening walls. Jdahya and Tediin followed.”

— Octavia E. Butler

217. “I want you to be serious. I realize I don’t know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic.”

— Octavia E. Butler

218. “Do not worship God Inexorable God Neither needs nor wants Your worship. Instead, Acknowledge and attend God, Learn from God, With forethought and intelligence, Imagination and industry, Shape God. When you must, Yield to God. Adapt and endure.”

— Octavia E. Butler

219. “Peace is dangerous because it encourages complacency and carelessness.”

— Octavia E. Butler

220. “His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. 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

221. “Human beings are good at creating hells for themselves, even out of richness.”

— Octavia E. Butler

222. “We couldn’t survive as a people if we were always confined to one ship or one world.”

— Octavia E. Butler

223. “We dull your natural fear of strangers and of difference. We keep you from injuring or killing us or yourselves.”

— Octavia E. Butler

224. “It shouldn’t be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction.”

— Octavia E. Butler

225. “Some say God is a spirit, a force, an ultimate reality. Ask seven people what all of that means and you’ll get seven different answers. So what is God? Just another name for whatever makes you feel special and protected?”

— Octavia E. Butler

226. “I wanted to disappear. Instead, I grew to be six feet tall. Boys in particular seemed to assume that I had done this growing deliberately and that I should be ridiculed for it as often as possible.”

— Octavia E. Butler

227. “The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments – the ones abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship rights – still exist, but they’ve been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don’t much matter. Indenturing indigents is supposed to keep them employed, teach them a trade, feed them, house them, and keep them out of trouble. In fact, it’s just one more way of getting people to work for nothing or almost nothing.”

— Octavia E. Butler

228. “Just struggling with my own perversity.”

— Octavia E. Butler

229. “They consider it a sin to take any life, yet they kill and kill.”

— Octavia E. Butler

230. “Curt Loehr, the Oankali said, needed people to look after. People stabilized him, gave him purpose. Without them, he might have been a criminal – or dead.”

— Octavia E. Butler

231. “Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself. What is left of it now, what it has become, I do not know.”

— Octavia E. Butler

232. “Patrols. Groups of young whites who ostensibly maintained order among the slaves. Patrols. Forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan.”

— Octavia E. Butler

233. “Remembering wasn’t safe. You could lose your mind, remembering.”

— Octavia E. Butler

234. “This means 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. If they’re used that way, they can help us in our only real relationship with God.”

— Octavia E. Butler

235. “We do what we do, Lilith.”

— Octavia E. Butler

236. “Sometimes you have to remember a feeling you haven’t had for a long time and bring it back so you can transmit it to someone else or use a feeling you have about one thing to help someone understand something else.”

— Octavia E. Butler

237. “The powerful imaginative impulse that produced Kindred had its first test runs in the escapist fantasies of a child who needed to find or invent alternative realties. By temperament and by virtue of her strict Baptist upbringing, Butler was reclusive; imaginary worlds solaced her against the pinched rewards of the actual world, and books took the place of friends.”

— Octavia E. Butler

238. “Lilith’s ability had run in her family, although neither she nor her ancestors had been able to control it. It had either lain dormant in them or come to life in insane, haphazard fashion and caused the growth of useless new tissue. New tissue gone obscenely wrong. Humans called this condition cancer. To them, it was a hated disease. To the Oankali, it was treasure. It was beauty beyond Human comprehension.”

— Octavia E. Butler

239. “Back when I was at home, my aunt and uncle would have felt like that,” Day said. “We walk the highways and scrounge and scavenge and ask for work, and all of that reminds people that what’s happened to us can happen to them. They don’t like to think about stuff like that, so they get mad at us. They make the cops arrest us or run us out of town. They call us names and wish somebody would do something to make us disappear. And now, somebody is doing just that!”

— Octavia E. Butler

240. “Sometimes writing about a thing makes it easier to stand.”

— Octavia E. Butler

241. “Earth is a big place. Even if parts of it are uninhabitable, it’s still a damn big place.”

— Octavia E. Butler