Octavia Butler
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.Collection: Liars
All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Inspiration
Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be.Collection: Thinking
We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.Collection: Confidence
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.Collection: Ignorance
In order to rise From its own ashes A phoenix First Must Burn.Collection: Order
Consider We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.Collection: Purpose
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.Collection: Struggle
Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Giving Up
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.Collection: Children
A tree Cannot grow In its parents' shadows.Collection: Tree
Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.Collection: Inspiration
Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.Collection: Writing
I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.Collection: Writing
The essentials are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.Collection: Destiny
I'm a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black,...an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.Collection: Ambition
Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn't find anything to complain about.Collection: Complaining
The differences you perceive between Humans-between groups of Humans-are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environmentsCollection: Differences
I'm literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Women
Souls! When have you seen your own soul - that you're so certain you have one?Collection: Soul
It's interesting how many science fiction writers get going when they are very young. I was on a program with Greg Bear and he mentioned that he had gotten started writing when he was eight. And I began writing when I was 10. I think we're influenced by the stuff, we find it and we love it and we're influenced by it....I know I collected my first rejection slip when I was 13, and I went on collecting them for a long time after that.Collection: Writing
Most of us don't have to worry about being shot of we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.Collection: Writing
I lost an arm on my last trip home.Collection: Home
A victim of God may, Through learning adaption, Become a partner of God, A victim of God may, Through forethought and planning, Become a shaper of God. Or a victim of God may, Through shortsightedness and fear, Remain God's victim, God's plaything, God's prey.Collection: May
You are horror and beauty in rare combination.Collection: Beauty
I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.Collection: Years
Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn't vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.Collection: Dad
Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.Collection: Mean
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.Collection: Fool
That which could hunger, could starve.Collection: Hunger
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.Collection: Mind
Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you're afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It's about not being able to stop at all.Collection: Doubt
There's no narcotic like exhaustion.Collection: Narcotics
Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.Collection: Who I Am
The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Mean
Belief initiates and guides action - or it does nothing.Collection: Doe
He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.Collection: Crazy
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.Collection: Pain
In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.Collection: Years
It's when people begin using their religion as just a way of getting power over other people that scares me. I'm afraid that's what's going on in a lot of cases right now. When people deliberately tell lies, Creationism for instance, and pretend, "Oh, it's not really religion." I mean they know they're lying, and yet they're the religious people. There's something wrong there.Collection: Religious
Nothing. It just finds you a lot more attractive than it does most Humans. What can you do with a beautiful woman that you can’t do with an ugly one? Nothing. It’s just a matter of preference.Collection: Beautiful
Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.Collection: Growing Up