"‘It’s impossible to go through life unscathed. Nor should you want to. By the hurts we accumulate, we measure both our follies and our accomplishments.’"

"‘I don’t know how else to teach you what you need to learn except by showing you your mistakes over and over again until you stop making them.’"

"‘You cheated.’ ‘No, I exploited a weakness in my opponent. There is a difference.’"

"You must learn to see what you are looking at."

"Well, I suppose I won't see you for a while. So farewell, good luck, avoid roasted cabbage, don't eat ear wax, and look on the bright side of life!"

"It seems a cold world without something … more." "On the contrary," said Oromis, "it is a better world . A place where we are responsible for our own actions, where we can be kind to one another because we want to and because it is the right thing to do instead of being frightened into behaving by the threat of divine punishment. I won't tell you what to believe, Eragon. It is far better to be taught to think critically and then be allowed to make your own decisions than to have someone else's notions thrust upon you. You asked after our religion, and I have answered you true. Make of it what you will."

"My father's work will not go unfinished, even if it takes me to the grave. That is what I want you, as a rider, to understand. All of Ajihad's plans, all his strategies and goals, they are mine now. I will not fail him by being weak. The empire will be brought down, Galbatorix will with dethroned, and the rightful government will be raised."

"Characters are born from necessity."

"It was a beautiful day to grow up."

"Those whom we love are often the most alien to us."

"Applied properly, it [logic] can overcome any lack of wisdom, which one only gains through age and experience."

"Shall we dance, friend of my heart?"

"Live in the present, remember the past, and fear not the future, for it doesn't exist and never shall. There is only now."

"So tell me, is it true that men have ten toes, as is said?"

"No-one can function properly without occasional peace and quiet."

"When you can have anything you want by uttering a few words, the goal matters not, only the journey to it."

"The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living."

"To search and seek among the outer bounds, And when we land upon a distant shore, To seek another yet farther still."

"It never struck me as interesting that I didn't go to school — we had our own little world. I always thought of kids who were going to regular school as if they're the others, the separate ones."

"And even the most pleasant of dreams could be painful under the light of the morning sun."

"It seemed like every month that went by, every day older, life became more complicated. The rule for growing up seemed to be that no choice, no decision worth making was without some cost."

"A girl looking for emotion could starve in L.A."

"Strangewood was never silent. It was never supposed to be. There was such life and color in the wood and in the creatures who lived there that silence would be tantamount to death. It was very silent in Strangewood."

"He was still as kind as he had always been, but there was a distance in his eyes now that made her want to cry."

"And then music. Wind chimes. And the sound of someone playing a violin. A fiddle. Or maybe just the music of a little dragon's wings. Maybe."

"Instead, it had slipped into her subconscious, and worked its way beneath her skin. -"

"A caffeinated Jenna is bad for everyone. -"

"Jenna Blake was still alive because she'd been willing to risk looking stupid."

"Kreske had more authority, but he was a moron."

"‘When you teach them—teach them not to fear. Fear is good in small amounts, but when it is a constant, pounding companion, it cuts away at who you are and makes it hard to do what is right.’"

":Choose your leaders"

"she wrote about Black women and about Black feminism, about Black futures, but she wrote in a way that appealed to all human beings. And I think that that, to me, is one of the essences of feminism. It’s like, we’re not saying we’re better than or beyond. We’re saying we are right here, equal to anyone else and able to lead as much as anyone else. So, she understood that. She wrote it beautifully."

"one of the things that was so powerful to me when I first picked up Octavia is that she wrote these strong Black feminine characters, these protagonists, who now you might look back and see the nonbinary, see the queerness, see other things in them, but at the time, she was writing these characters, and it was like, “Oh, there’s young Black women, and they’re leading.”"

"so much has changed there because of the work of Octavia, because of the work of Nnedi Okorafor, because of the work of Tananarive Due."

"she was a worker, so she was a laborer. She was always working. And her writing process would be waking up at 3:00 in the morning, because she needed to do it. She had what she called “positive obsession,” a positive obsession with moving these stories out."

"Walidah Imarisha and I, when we did Octavia’s Brood, Walidah called it “visionary fiction,” to look ahead at the future and then write ourselves in. And that’s what Octavia was doing with all of her work."

"In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. cautioned us about adding "deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars." He wrote that darkness cannot drive out darkness, that hate cannot drive out hate, and he reminded us that only love can do that. Thirty years later, Octavia E. Butler wrote in her novel Parable of the Sower that our "destiny is to take root among the stars." The activist and the artist seem at first to have been engaged in markedly different lifework, yet they embraced a shared dream for the future. Their work is linked by faith and a fusion of spiritual teachings and social consciousness, a futuristic social gospel. In its essence, social justice work, which King embodied and Butler expressed so skillfully in her novels and stories, is about love-a love that has the best hopes and wishes for humanity at heart."

"Octavia Butler's wild and talented science fiction novels."

"Since Trump got elected, many people in my community have been talking about how Octavia Butler was a prophet and how her books Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents eerily predicted the climate change, wildfires, and fascism of our current world. Many people in movement spaces have taken Butler's words as prophecy and text...But what is often missing from these discussions is how Lauren Olamina, Butler's Black, genderqueer teenage hero who leads her community out of the ashes and founds a new spirituality that embraces change as god, is disabled. In the book, she is called a sharer: someone with hyperempathy syndrome from her mother's use of the Einstein drug, a popular drug that heightened intelligence. She feels everything everyone feels, and it's often overwhelming in a way that reminds me of some autistic and neurodivergent realities. It gives her impairments and also gifts. To me, Butler's Parable books are a Black disability justice narrative."

"Kindred is her most overtly political novel, the Patternmaster series the most popular. Survivor brilliantly blends genre SF with issues of colonialism and racism."

"(The book that...shaped my worldview:) Dawn by Octavia E. Butler."

"At a retreat for women writers in 1988, Octavia E. Butler said that she never wanted the title of being the solitary Black female sci-fi writer. She wanted to be one of many Black female sci-fi writers. She wanted to be one of thousands of folks writing themselves into the present and into the future. We believe in that right Butler claimed for each of us-the right to dream as ourselves, individually and collectively. But we also think it is a responsibility she handed down: are we brave enough to imagine beyond the boundaries of "the real" and then do the hard work of sculpting reality from our dreams?"

"We titled this collection in honor of Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Butler explored the intersections of identity and imagination, the gray areas of race, class, gender, sexuality, love, militarism, inequality, oppression, resistance, and most important-hope. Her work has taught us so much about the principles of visionary fiction, inspiring us. The title plays on Butler's three novel collection, Lilith's Brood, which is about adaptation as a necessity for survival. Changes will occur that we cannot even begin to imagine, and the next generation will be both utterly familiar and wholly alien to their parents. We believe this is what it means to carry on Butler's legacy of writing visionary fiction."

"I wish more people would talk about the ways in which she messes with normative sexualities, and I miss her very much"