Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction author. Multiple recipients of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, she became in 1995 the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Born in Pasadena, California, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Extremely shy as a child, Butler found an outlet at the library reading fantasy and writing. These Octavia Butler quotes will motivate you.
Best Octavia Butler Quotes
- “Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.” ~ Octavia Butler, Octavia Butler quotes on leadership
- “No, I think the future of humanity will be like the past, we’ll do what we’ve always done and there will still be human beings. Granted, there will always be people doing something different and there are a lot of possibilities.” ~ Octavia Butler
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“In order to rise From its own ashes, A phoenix First Must Burn.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “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 Butler
- “We’re all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Every story I create creates me. I write to create myself. Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow.” ~ Octavia Butler
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“Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “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 Butler
- “All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles, and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.” ~ Octavia Butler
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“Consider We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “We need the stars… We need purpose! We need the image the Destiny to take root among the stars gives us of ourselves as a purposeful, growing species. We need to become the adult species that the Destiny can help us become! If we’re to be anything other than smooth dinosaurs who evolve, specialize and die, we need the stars…. When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Kindness eases change Love quiets fear” ~ Octavia Butler, Octavia Butler quotes on love
- “People who want to write either do it or they don’t. At last I began to say that my most important talent – or habit – was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It’s amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.” ~ Octavia Butler
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“Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one’s own place, One’s own people, One’s own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise- Into growth and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.” ~ Octavia Butler, Octavia Butler quotes on writing
- “The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn’t manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I’m me and I’m here and I’m writing.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.” ~ Octavia Butler
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“Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.” ~ Octavia Butler, Octavia Butler quotes on change
- “Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we’re as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.” ~ Octavia Butler
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“When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “I’m a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I’m also comfortably asocial — a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles — a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “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 Butler
- “The big talent is persistence.” ~ Octavia Butler
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“I’m me, and I’m here, and I’m writing.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “If you want a thing–truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible” ~ Octavia Butler
- “There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “A tree Cannot grow In its parents’ shadows.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Beware At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease” ~ Octavia Butler
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“There’s no narcotic-like exhaustion.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Rejections are painful but inevitable. They’re every writer’s rite of passage.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “You are hierarchical. That’s the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It’s a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all… That was like ignoring cancer.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.” ~ Octavia Butler, Octavia Butler quotes on habit
- “Civilization is the way one’s own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.” ~ Octavia Butler
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“Every story I create creates me. I write to create myself.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Life is getting better, but that won’t stop a war if politicians and business people decide it’s to their advantage to have one.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “All religions are ultimately cargo cults. Adherents perform required rituals, follow specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally gifted with desired rewards long life, honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth, victory over opponents, immortality after death, any desired rewards.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.” ~ Octavia Butler
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“…I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “When I meet a woman who attracts me, I prefer women,’ she said. ‘And when I meet a man who attracts me, I prefer men.’ ‘You mean you haven’t made up your mind yet.’ ‘I mean exactly what I said. I told you you wouldn’t like it. Most people who ask want me definitely on one side or the other.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “That which could hunger could starve.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “To get along with God, Consider the consequences of your behavior. Earthseed: The Books of the Living” ~ Octavia Butler
- “I think people really need to think what it’s like to have all of society arrayed against you.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “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 you did understand them, the Humans got angry and acted as though you had stolen thoughts from their minds.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “If there’s any single talent a writer needs, it’s persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.” ~ Octavia Butler
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“We give our dead To the orchards And the groves. We give our dead To life.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “I have a huge and savage conscience that won’t let me get away with things.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Better to stay alive,” I said. “At least while there’s a chance to get free.” I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write – every day, no excuses. It’s so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they’d rather clean the toilet than do the writing.” ~ Octavia Butler
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“Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “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 Butler
- “Not everyone has been a bully or the victim of bullies, but everyone has seen bullying, and seeing it, has responded to it by joining in or objecting, by laughing or keeping silent, by feeling disgusted or feeling interested.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Most of what I do is science fiction. Some of the things I do are fantasy. I don’t like the labels, they’re marketing tools, and I certainly don’t worry about them when I’m writing. They are also inhibiting factors; you wind up not getting read by certain people, or not getting sold to certain people because they think they know what you write. You say science fiction and everybody thinks Star Wars or Star Trek.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “No… a novel is a long business. I’m a slow writer, even when I’m doing very well I write slowly.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.” ~ Octavia Butler
