Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Octavia E. Butler

Quote by Octavia E. Butler

“I have to write. I don't know what else to do. The others are asleep now, but it isn't dark. I'm on watch because I couldn't sleep if I tried. I'm jittery and crazed. I can't cry. I want to get up and just urn and run... Run away from everything. But there isn't any away. I have to write. There's nothing familiar left to me but the writing. God is Change. I hate God. I have to write.”

Quote by Octavia E. Butler

Work

Parable of the Sower

In this novel, a young woman named Laisha leads her family through a post-apocalyptic world, facing the challenges of a society ravaged by environmental collapse and social upheaval. more

Author

Octavia E. Butler

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Octavia E. Butler. more

You May Also Like

“What Pa did doesn't represent all of who he is. There's a bigger picture. Amma said something to me once, when I found a drawing someone had done of her when she was a teenager: In life we wear a hundred faces - the bawling infant, the happy child, the starry-eyed youth. Each face belongs to a different life. I didn't fully understand it then. But maybe I do now. A lifetime is made up of dozens of lives, tied together only by shared memory. Who I was when I was a baby isn't the same person I was at age ten, much less who I am now. Who Pa was in his twenties isn't the same man he is today. And I have to believe that the man he is today shouldn't have to die for the mistakes of the other man who wore his face twelve years ago.”

“We spend our lives seeking comfort, and when we find it, we bury ourselves deep within it. But on the odd occasion, when all is quiet, something will come along that’ll rip us out of the ground and throw us into the unknown. A place where everything means nothing, nothing means everything and where comforts cease to be. It’s hard, there's no denying that, but remember, often the hardest and most unexpected situations can encourage the best type of change, growth.”

“I do think I've seen the generation that I've seen grow up have different resources, have different skills and options around dealing with that harm, and that makes a difference for me. But I did have a hope that like, OK, we had to go through all this stuff, but at least we can have this set of children that we can see from here, this set of children that we are raising in this context and they will not have to go through things that are very similar. And they have gone through things that are very similar, and that is something that, you know, intellectually, we understand that these things are intergenerational cycles of violence, and it's really hard to accept that it will be incrementally different, but not totally gone within the span of a decade or two.”