Octavia E. Butler

There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.

Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about.

Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.

He was surprised when I ignored him. He is wealthy and arrogant and used to being listened to even when what he says is nonsense—as it often is.

Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have.

Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter.

“Yes,” he said, “intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.”

She found more gratification in teaching one willing student than a dozen resentful ones.

There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one. (p124)

She was too alert, too alive not to have the kind of mind that probed and reached and got her into trouble now and then.

I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. (beginning of Prologue)

“He’s a fair man.”

I looked at him, startled.

“I said fair,” he repeated. “Not likable.”

I kept quiet. His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.