Octavia Butler

“I can’t do it, Joachim. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. A long leash is still a leash. And Coransee will still be at the other end of it, holding on.”

““I’ll tell you,” she said softly. “But you won’t like it.”He looked away from her. “I asked for the truth. Whether I like it or not, I have to know.””

“He showed me his fantastic library first, and that helped me warm to him a little. A guy with a room like that in his house couldn’t be all bad.”

“A pet. In pets, free will was tolerated only as long as the pet owner found it amusing.”

“Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about.”

““He’s a fair man.”I kept quiet. 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.”

“He didn’t look all right to me. “Has anyone gone for the doctor?”“Marse Tom don’t hardly get Doc West for ague. He says all the doc knows is bleeding and blistering and purging and puking and making folks sicker than they was to start.””

“Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have.”

“I got up to leave. There was nothing more to be said. He had asked for what he knew I could not give, and I had refused.”

“Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave.”

“She was too alert, too alive not to have the kind of mind that probed and reached and got her into trouble now and then.”

“She glanced at him. “What gods do you respect?”“I help myself,” he said.”

“He was surprised when I ignored him. He is wealthy and arrogant and used to being listened to even when what he says is nonsense—as it often is.”

“Beware:”

“Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.”

““What will they do when they have only the herbs” he asked her.“Live or die as best they can,” she said. “Everything truly alive dies sooner or later.””

““You’re bright,” Lupe said to her softly. “Very bright, but stubborn. You think you can choose your realities. You can’t.””

““It was an old passion,” he said. “I haven’t touched a violin for months. I didn’t know what that would be like.”He began to walk so that she almost missed his answer. “An amputation,” he whispered.”

“They had clearly feared turn-of-the-century irrationality—religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological intolerance and corporate greed.”

“So he had locked her in the closet. Some of his people, ignorant and fearful, could not quite believe her illness was not contagious. Badger locked her away from them for her own safety. She had seen for herself how eager they were to get her out of their sight.”

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

“Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter.”

““I don’t understand why the sight of you should scare me so,” Joseph said. He did not sound frightened. “You don’t look that threatening. Just...very different.” threatening to most species,” Nikanj answered. “Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it’s true for you.””

“She found more gratification in teaching one willing student than a dozen resentful ones.”

““I didn’t want to scare you. We don’t want to scare anyone.”“No? Well, sometimes it’s a good thing to scare people. Sometimes fear is all that will keep them from doing stupid things.””

“If you don’t care about my people, why should I care about yours?”

“He thought about that for a moment, wondered what he should say. The truth or nothing. The truth.”

““Yori, 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.””

“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 everybody had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant.”

“Life was treasure. The only treasure.”

“Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.”

“Humans were genetically inclined to be intolerant of difference. They could overcome the inclination, but it was a reality of the Human conflict that they often did not.”

“All that you touchIs Change.”

“A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of superperson. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.”

“Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.”

“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. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.”

“A victim of God may,God’s prey.”

“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.”

“A treeIn its parents’ shadows.”

“The Destiny of EarthseedIs to take root among the stars.”

“All strugglesknocking their heads together.”

“Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.”

““When it comes to strangers with guns,” I told her, “I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust.””

“Freedom is dangerous, Cory, but it’s precious, too. You can’t just throw it away or let it slip away. You can’t sell it for bread and pottage.”

“There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.”

““Your God doesn’t care about you at all,” Travis said.“All the more reason to care about myself and others.””

““From what I’ve read,” I said to him, “the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is to survive until it goes sane again.””

“Consider—But with potential.”

“We give our deadTo life.”

“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.”

“Beware:Ignorance grows.”

“Now I have been raped.It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.”

“We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.So much agony caused, so much evil done in God’s name.”

“If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it.”

“All religions are ultimately cargo cults.death, any desired rewards.”

“Are you Earthseed?Or it does nothing.”

“Jarrett would be easier to take if he cared half as much about children’s bodies and minds as he pretends to care about their souls.”

““I’m not a demagogue.”“That’s too bad. That leaves the field to people who are demagogues—to the Jarrets of the world. And there have always been Jarrets. Probably there always will be.””

“No one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people’s children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn’t hurt them!”

“I’m literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.”

“We’ve also been laughed at, argued with, booed, and threatened with hellfire—or gunfire. But Jarret’s kind of religion and Jarret himself are getting less and less popular these days. Both, it seems, are bad for business, bad for the U. S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they’ve just made others very angry.”

“How completely, how thoroughly he has stolen my child. I have never even tried to forgive him.”

““It’s a crucifix,” Wright told me when I showed it to him. “It must have been worn by one of the people who lived here. Or maybe the arsonist lost it.” He gave a humorless smile. “You never know who’s liable to turn out to be religious.””

““He had guns,” Celia said. “Iosif didn’t like guns, but Stefan did.”It hadn’t helped him survive.”

“My ignorance wasn’t just annoying. It was dangerous.”

“That is the most unromantic declaration of love I’ve ever heard. Or is that what you’re saying? Do you love me, Shori, or do I just taste good?”

“We can see that our Councils aren’t games like the tribunals humans have. The work of a Council of Judgment is to learn the truth and then decide what to do about it within our law. It isn’t about following laws so strictly that the guilty go unpunished or the innocent are made to suffer. It isn’t about protecting everyone’s rights. It’s about finding the truth, period, and then deciding what to do about it.”