1. Citations
  2. Auteurs
  3. Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler citations
Page 3

Octavia Estelle Butler, née le 22 juin 1947 à Pasadena en Californie et morte le 24 février 2006 à Lake Forest Park dans l'État de Washington, est une écrivaine de science-fiction afro-américaine des États-Unis publiée en France par la maison d'édition Au diable vauvert. Wikipedia  

✵ 22. juin 1947 – 24. février 2006   •   Autres noms Օկտավիա Բատլեր, اکتاویا باتلر
Octavia E. Butler photo
Octavia E. Butler: 108   citations 0   J'aime

Octavia E. Butler Citations

“Attention :
A la guerre
Comme en temps de paix,
L'égoïsme aveugle
Fait plus de victimes
Que tous les autres fléaux

Semence de la Terre : le Livre des Vivants”

Octavia E. Butler livre La Parabole des talents

Parable of the Talents

Octavia E. Butler: Citations en anglais

“Life is getting better, but that won’t stop a war if politicians and business people decide it’s to their advantage to have one.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre La Parabole des talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 5 (p. 90)

“Your God doesn’t care about you at all,” Travis said.
“All the more reason to care about myself and others.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Parable of the Sower

Source: Parable of the Sower (1993), Chapter 18 (p. 221)

“If you don’t care about my people, why should I care about yours?”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Adulthood Rites

Part II “Phoenix” chapter 15 (p. 383)
Adulthood Rites (1988)

“Humans were genetically inclined to be intolerant of difference. They could overcome the inclination, but it was a reality of the Human conflict that they often did not.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Imago

Source: Imago (1989), Chapter III, “Imago” section 7 (p. 710)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Kindred

Source: Kindred (1979), Chapter 5, “The Storm” section 13 (pp. 236-37).

““I don’t understand why the sight of you should scare me so,” Joseph said. He did not sound frightened. “You don’t look that threatening. Just… very different.”
“Different is threatening to most species,” Nikanj answered. “Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it’s true for you.””

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Dawn

Part III “Nursery” chapter 12 (p. 186).
Dawn (1987)

“All religions are ultimately cargo cults.
Adherents perform required rituals, follow
specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally
gifted with desired rewards—long life,
honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth,
victory over opponents, immortality after
death, any desired rewards.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre La Parabole des talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 19 (p. 357)

“I realize I don’t know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Parable of the Sower

Source: Parable of the Sower (1993), Chapter 5 (p. 58)

“Tomas stopped and looked at the three Oankali. “Do you believe in spirits?”
“We believe in life,” Ahajas said.
“Life after death?”
Ahajas smoothed her tentacles briefly in agreement. “When I’m dead,” she said, “I will nourish other life.”
“But I mean—”
“If I died on a lifeless world, a world that could sustain some form of life if it were tenacious enough, organelles within each cell of my body would survive and evolve. In perhaps a thousand million years, that world would be as full of life as this one.”
“…it would?”
“Yes. Our ancestors have seeded a great many barren worlds that way. Nothing is more tenacious than the life we are made of. A world of life from apparent death, from dissolution. That’s what we believe in.”
“Nothing more?””

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Imago

Ahajas became smooth enough with amusement to reflect firelight. “No, Lelka. Nothing more.”
Source: Imago (1989), Chapter II, “Exile” section 12 (pp. 662-663)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Dawn

Part III “Nursery” chapter 1 (p. 126)
Dawn (1987)

“He showed me his fantastic library first, and that helped me warm to him a little. A guy with a room like that in his house couldn’t be all bad.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Mind of My Mind

Source: Mind of My Mind (1977), Chapter 2 (p. 288)

“Are you Earthseed?
Do you believe?
Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action—
Or it does nothing.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre La Parabole des talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 20 (p. 382)

“Yori, Human purpose isn’t what you say it is or what I say it is. It’s what your biology says it is—what your genes say it is.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Adulthood Rites

Part IV “Home” chapter 5 (p. 501)
Adulthood Rites (1988)

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

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler Wild Seed

Source: Wild Seed (1980), Chapter 6 (p. 100)

“Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.
Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major, nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre La Parabole des talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 1 (pp. 8-9)

“They had clearly feared turn-of-the-century irrationality—religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological intolerance and corporate greed.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Clay's Ark

Source: Clay's Ark (1984), Chapter 23 (p. 583)

“There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Parable of the Sower

Source: Parable of the Sower (1993), Chapter 17 (p. 200)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler Wild Seed

Source: Wild Seed (1980), Chapter 1 (p. 18)

“From what I’ve read,” I said to him, “the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is to survive until it goes sane again.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Parable of the Sower

Source: Parable of the Sower (1993), Chapter 19 (p. 229)

“How completely, how thoroughly he has stolen my child. I have never even tried to forgive him.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre La Parabole des talents

Epilogue (p. 446)
Parable of the Talents (1998)

“You’re bright,” Lupe said to her softly. “Very bright, but stubborn. You think you can choose your realities. You can’t.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Clay's Ark

Source: Clay's Ark (1984), Chapter 12 (p. 522)

“Freedom is dangerous, Cory, but it’s precious, too. You can’t just throw it away or let it slip away. You can’t sell it for bread and pottage.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Parable of the Sower

Source: Parable of the Sower (1993), Chapter 11 (p. 122)

“We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.
So much agony caused, so much evil done in God’s name.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre La Parabole des talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 15 (p. 288)

“I’m literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre La Parabole des talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 20 (p. 405)

“Now I have been raped.
It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre La Parabole des talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 13 (p. 253)

““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.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Kindred

Source: Kindred (1979), Chapter 4, “The Fight” section 6 (p. 134).

“What will they do when they have only the herbs” he asked her.
“Live or die as best they can,” she said. “Everything truly alive dies sooner or later.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler Wild Seed

Source: Wild Seed (1980), Chapter 14 (p. 247)

“A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of superperson. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Parable of the Sower

Source: Parable of the Sower (1993), Chapter 2 (p. 15)

“He thought about that for a moment, wondered what he should say. The truth or nothing. The truth.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Adulthood Rites

Part IV “Home” chapter 5 (p. 501)
Adulthood Rites (1988)

““It was an old passion,” he said. “I haven’t touched a violin for months. I didn’t know what that would be like.”
“What is it like?” she asked.
He began to walk so that she almost missed his answer. “An amputation,” he whispered.”

Help us translate this quote
Octavia E. Butler livre Clay's Ark

Source: Clay's Ark (1984), Chapter 14 (p. 533)

Auteurs similaires

Frank Herbert photo
Frank Herbert 24
écrivain américain, auteur de romans de science-fiction
Arthur Conan Doyle photo
Arthur Conan Doyle 15
écrivain et médecin écossais
Mario Vargas Llosa photo
Mario Vargas Llosa 14
écrivain péruvien et espagnol, auteur de romans et d'essais…
Haruki Murakami photo
Haruki Murakami 21
écrivain japonais
James Joyce photo
James Joyce 73
romancier, auteur dramatique, poète, critique et professeur…
Stephen King photo
Stephen King 90
écrivain américain
Charles Bukowski photo
Charles Bukowski 19
écrivain américain
Bertolt Brecht photo
Bertolt Brecht 13
dramaturge, metteur en scène, critique théâtral et poète al…
Terry Pratchett photo
Terry Pratchett 82
écrivain britannique
Bob Marley photo
Bob Marley 4
auteur-compositeur-interprète jamaïcain