Lydia > Lydia's Quotes

“Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it.”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“We’ll have to be very careful how we allow our needs to shape us.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“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.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“          The Self must create           Its own reasons for being.           To shape God,           Shape Self.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Human beings are good at creating hells for themselves, even out of richness.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Once people get the idea that it’s all right to take what you want and destroy the rest, who knows when they’ll stop.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Earthseed deals with ongoing reality, not with supernatural authority figures. Worship is no good without action. With action, it’s only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, eases your mind.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Drowning people
Sometimes die
Fighting their rescuers.”
― Octavia Butler

“I was weeding the back garden and thinking about the way plants seed themselves, windborne, animalborne, waterborne, far from their parent plants. They have no ability at all to travel great distances under their own power, and yet, they do travel. Even they don’t have to just sit in one place and wait to be wiped out. There are islands thousands of miles from anywhere—the Hawaiian Islands, for example, and Easter Island—where plants seeded themselves and grew long before any humans arrived. Earthseed. I am Earthseed. Anyone can be. Someday, I think there will be a lot of us. And I think we’ll have to seed ourselves farther and farther from this dying place.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower