Octavia Butler quotes - page 6

Octavia Butler was an influential American science fiction writer, renowned for her explorations of race, gender, and power in speculative worlds. Her groundbreaking novels, such as "Kindred" and the "Patternist" series, have left a lasting impact on the genre. She inspired generations of readers and writers with her visionary storytelling and thought-provoking themes. Here are 163 of her quotes:

Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes - they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes - a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day.

Octavia Butler

I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.

Octavia Butler

On the other hand, I was very much interested in the way people behaved, the human dance, how they seemed to move around each other. I wanted to play around with that.

Octavia Butler

Once you grow past Mommy and Daddy coming running when you're hurt, you're really on your own. You're alone, and there's no one to help you.

Octavia Butler

What I'm working on now - I'm back to fantasy, although considering that it's me, I'm turning it into a kind of science fantasy. It's a vampire story - but my vampires are biological vampires. They didn't become vampires because someone bit them; they were born that way.

Octavia Butler

When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.

Octavia Butler

There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.

Octavia Butler

I didn't want to scare you. We don't want to scare anyone.

Octavia Butler

Intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike.

Octavia Butler

Tomas stopped and looked at the three Oankali. "Do you believe in spirits?” "We believe in life,” Ahajas said. "Life after death?” Ahajas smoothed her tentacles briefly in agreement. "When I'm dead,” she said, "I will nourish other life.” "But I mean-” "If I died on a lifeless world, a world that could sustain some form of life if it were tenacious enough, organelles within each cell of my body would survive and evolve. In perhaps a thousand million years, that world would be as full of life as this one.” "...it would?” "Yes. Our ancestors have seeded a great many barren worlds that way. Nothing is more tenacious than the life we are made of. A world of life from apparent death, from dissolution. That's what we believe in.” "Nothing more?”.

Octavia Butler

We are a naturally hierarchical species.

Octavia Butler

So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.

Octavia Butler

I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.

Octavia Butler

I'm very happy alone.

Octavia Butler

Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.

Octavia Butler

My characters hope for better lives.

Octavia Butler

I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.

Octavia Butler

Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.

Octavia Butler

Most vampires, I've discovered, are men, for some reason. I guess it's because Dracula, people are kind of feeding off that.

Octavia Butler

The big talent is persistence.

Octavia Butler

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

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