Octavia E. Butler Quotes

A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more.

Your own experience keeps taking you towards something. My book adds the hope that it's a better something.

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

'Raining Diamonds' talks about knowing there's something better out there. You don't have to just settle.

I think my best years are ahead of me and that's exciting.

The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.

Give yourself a chance to see how much better life will get. And it will get better.

I feel like I have a new life and I'm going to take full advantage of it.

As cheesy and cornball as it sounds, life does get better - if you want it to.

Your life is big. Keep reaching.

I began to feel the desire for something more; I wanted to do something to make things better.

I expect if you are going to come out of the shadows, then you're going to want to have some type of hope in the future that you're going to improve your life and, yes, accomplish that American Dream.

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.

In this fallen world, I suspect we will never achieve perfection. But that won't stop me trying.

I'd like to think there's still a lot for me to do, you know?

What people want is a sense of a better future to come.

I'm going to tell stories to the world. I think there's time for me to grow. We'll see.

I want to be a better person in every aspect. I really don't feel I've in anyway fulfilled my potential in every area of my life. But I'm optimistic.

People come to L.A. because they're chasing that dream of a better life. That's why I came here, because I thought it would be a place where I would find other people like me; people who wanted to write, people who had a dream of being something else. And that proved to be true.

I never gave up believing that there was much more to life than how I was living it.

My life has gotten so much better since I turned 40.

If I can inspire someone to go in a positive way and pursue a dream, it can only be good.

For me life is a challenge. And it will be a challenge if I live to be 100 or if I get to be a trillionaire.

I believe people are fundamentally good and want to find things that make life better for themselves. There are social dynamics for people that work, and there are ones that are pathological. But beneath every 'no' lays a 'yes' that had never been broken. I put my life-faith in that.

If R. Akiva was perhaps overly generous in judging his generation, it can perhaps be ascribed to the belief, based on his own experience, that everyone is capable of a dramatic life change.