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Octavia Butler

  • We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.

  • Souls! When have you seen your own soul — that you're so certain you have one?

  • Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyze yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.

    • Octavia Butler,
    • in "Birth of a Writer," Essence ()
  • Belief initiates and guides action — Or it does nothing.

  • 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 lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

  • Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.

    • Octavia Butler
  • Beware: / All too often, / We say / What we hear others say, / We think / What we're told that we think. / We see / What we're permitted to see. / Worse! / We see what we're told that we see.

  • Drowning people / Sometimes die / Fighting their rescuers.

  • 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.

  • Create no images of God. / Accept the images / that God has provided. / They are everywhere, / in everything. / ... The universe / is God's self-portrait.

Octavia Butler, U.S. writer

(1947 - 2006)

Full name: Octavia Estelle Butler.