Quotes From Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
By Aiyana Edmund | On July 6, 2018 | Updated February 11, 2024 | Comments (0)
Octavia E. Butler (1947 – 2006) was an American author of speculative, dystopian, and science fiction. In the white male-dominated field of science fiction, she broke ground as a Black woman writer in the genre. Following is a selection of quotes from Kindred, showcasing Octavia Butler’s keen observations of human nature.
After publishing some short stories, Octavia Butler’s first novel was Patternmaster (1976). It was the first in what would become a four-volume series. But it was Kindred (1979) that placed Octavia Butler firmly on the literary map.
The novel’s protagonist is Dana, a contemporary African-American woman who travels back in time to save an ancestor who happens to be a white slave owner. By saving him in his time, she ensures her own survival in the future.
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“Better to stay alive,” I said. “At least while there’s a chance to get free.” I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.”
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“Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of ‘wrong’ ideas.”
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“…I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought — and much less than I would know when he went away.”
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You may also like: 12 Fast Facts About Octavia Butler
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“As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else’s trouble.”
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“Frankly, it never occurred to me that I needed someone who looked like me to show me the way. I was ignorant and arrogant and persistent and the writing left me no choice at all.”
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“ … slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.”
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“Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.”
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“She was strange now, erratic, sometimes needing my friendship, trusting me with her dangerous longings for freedom, her wild plans to run away again; and sometimes hating me, blaming me for her trouble.”
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See also: Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
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“Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn’t say them, couldn’t sort out my feelings about them, couldn’t keep them bottled inside me.”
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“I didn’t want to depend on someone else’s chance violence again — violence that, if it came, could be more effective than I wanted.”
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“I got caught up in one of Kevin’s World War II books — a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred … Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture – quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.”
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“I’m not sure it’s possible for a lone black woman — or even a black man — to be protected in that place.”
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The Theme of Survival in Kindred
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“In fact, [the South Africans] were living in the past as far as their race relations went. They lived in ease and comfort supported by huge numbers of blacks whom they kept in poverty and held in contempt.”
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“He was like me — a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.”
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“He had already found the way to control me — by threatening others.”
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“Slavery is a long slow process of dulling.”
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“Strength. Endurance. To survive, my ancestors had to put up with more than I ever could. Much more.”
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Kindred by Octavia E. Butler on Bookshop.org
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler on Amazon*
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“She had done the safe thing — had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid. She was the kind of woman who might have been called ‘mammy’ in some other household. She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties.”
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“I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality. The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse.”
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Octavia Butler Quotes on Writing and Human Nature
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