top of page
Exlpore more Identity quotes

"I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself, maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it."

"You are the only one of your kind."

"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away."

"We have worth because we were created in the image and likeness of God."

"You must wear clothes which suits your own soul, not your own society! What you wish to do is much more important than what your society wants you to do!"

"You are the architect of your future, you decide whether you build a hut or a palace."
Explore more quotes by Octavia Butler

"While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn't save anything."

"People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me."

"And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing."

"You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence."

"No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest."

"Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish."

"Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over."

"A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't."

"Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere."

"I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people."
bottom of page