“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 E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of "wrong" ideas.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“That educated didn’t mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“She means the devil with people who say you're anything but what you are.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“Like all good works of fiction, it lies like the truth.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“I'd rather see the others."
"What others?"
"The ones who make it. The ones living in freedom now."
"If any do."
"They do."
"Some say they do. It's like dying, though, and going to heaven. Nobody ever comes back to tell you about it.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. It made no sense. No matter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred.
... Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture - quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“There are so many interesting times we could have visited.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“I closed my eyes and saw the children playing their game again. 'The ease seemed so frightening.' I said. 'Now I see why.'
'What?'
'The ease. Us, the children ... I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else's trouble.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“I lost an arm on my last trip home.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You need to look at some of the niggers they catch and bring back,” she said. “You need to see them—starving, ’bout naked, whipped, dragged, bit by dogs … You need to see them.” “I’d rather see the others.” “What others?” “The ones who make it. The ones living in freedom now.” “If any do.” “They do.” “Some say they do. It’s like dying, though, and going to heaven. Nobody ever comes back to tell you about it.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“Frankly, it never occurred to me that I needed someone who looked like me to show me the way. I was ignorant and arrogant and persistent and the writing left me no choice at all.”9”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“The ease. Us, the children… I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“in an interview Butler has stated that the meaning of the amputation is clear enough: “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.”1 Time”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“Daddy’s the only man I know,” he said softly, “who cares as much about giving his word to a black as to a white.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“She was strange now, erratic, sometimes needing my friendship, trusting me with her dangerous longings for freedom, her wild plans to run away again; and sometimes hating me, blaming me for her trouble. One”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“He led the way past the main house away from the slave cabins and other buildings, away from the small slave children who chased each other and shouted and didn’t understand yet that they were slaves.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“Someday Rufus would own the plantation. Someday, he would be the slaveholder, responsible in his own right for what happened to the people who lived in those half-hidden cabins. The boy was literally growing up as I watched—growing up because I watched and because I helped to keep him safe. I was the worst possible guardian for him—a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children. I would have all I could do to look after myself. But I would help him as best I could. And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn't kill, but she seemed to die a little.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“You want to know how moral she is?” His tone made me frown. “What do you mean?” “If she chases me any harder, she and I will wind up playing a scene from that Bible she reads. The scene between Potiphar’s wife and Joseph.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn't say them, couldn't sort out my feelings about them, couldn't keep them bottled inside me.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“But tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. I thought of Alice, and then of Rufus, and I realized that Rufus had done exactly what I had said he would do: Gotten possession of the woman without having to bother with her husband. Now, somehow, Alice would have to accept not only the loss of her husband, but her own enslavement. Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. It made no sense. No matter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense. I”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
“This is the biggest lot of abolitionist trash I ever saw.”
“No it isn’t,” I said. “That book wasn’t even written until a century after slavery was abolished.”
“Then why the hell are they still complaining about it?”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Kindred
Octavia E. Butler
Born place: in Pasadena, California, The United States
Born date June 22, 1947
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“And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves?”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“Andrew was watching him, still perched on the edge like he had a death wish. Neil wasn't sure why he did it, but he plucked Andrew's cigarette off the sidewalk and stuck it between his lips. He tipped his head to meet Andrew's unwavering gaze and tapped two fingers to his temple in Andrew's mocking salute.”
― Nora Sakavic, quote from The King's Men
“For a long while I have believed – this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness – that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity.
And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval.
But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.
What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theater, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Ground Beneath Her Feet
“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”
― Marcel Proust, quote from Time Regained
“-Atención -decía Bobby Thompson-. Éste es uno de los lobos que camina entre ustedes.”
― Richard Bachman, quote from The Running Man
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