Parable of the Sower

by Octavia E. Butler

“When I was your age, my mother told me that the stars—the few stars we could see—were windows into heaven.

They’re desperate or crazy or both. That’s enough to make anyone dangerous.

I can take a lot of pain without falling apart.

“Politicians and big corporations get the bread, and we get the circuses.”

Most people have given up on politicians. After all, politicians have been promising to return us to the glory, wealth, and order of the twentieth century ever since I can remember.

And I’m sorry that astronaut will be brought back from her own chosen heaven.

A little more hypocrisy to keep the peace.

God exists to be shaped.

Is any of this real?

change is part of life, of existence, of the common wisdom. But I don’t believe we’re dealing with all that that means. We haven’t even begun to deal with it.

Is that the way it’s going to be, I wonder? Is that the future: Large numbers of people stuck in either President-elect Donner’s version of slavery or Richard Moss’s.

But even superficial comfort is better than none, I guess.

“I intend to survive.”

It’s a good, comfortable, recreational time. What a pity to spoil it with reminders of reality.

“Live!” Dad said. “That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”

So Cory is right, but it doesn’t matter. And Dad is right, but he doesn’t go far enough. God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But God exists to be shaped.

I’ve never felt that it was anything other than real: discovery rather than invention, exploration rather than creation.

Food prices are insane, always going up, never down. Everyone complains about them.

Hmmm. Sounds familiar.

He wants a gun, though, the way thirsty people want water. He wants to be all grown up—yesterday.

The Destiny of Earthseed Is to take root among the stars.

There’s always a lot to do before you get to go to heaven.

To get along with God, Consider the consequences of your behavior.

The only power she has in the world is her authority over her children and her money.

Waiting to be older is worse than other kinds of waiting because there’s nothing you can do to make it happen faster.

All struggles Are essentially power struggles.

It’s just that I hated Keith at least as much as I loved him.

It’s beyond me how one human being could do that to another. If hyperempathy syndrome were a more common complaint, people couldn’t do such things.

It won’t be enough.

Sea level keeps rising with the warming climate and there is the occasional earthquake.

“Don’t hope for it, Cory. There’s nothing safe about slavery.”

“Those rich people would never let themselves be slaves.”

I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.

Earthseed: The Book of the Living. There are the Tibetan and the Egyptian Books of the Dead.

I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original.

She wants a future she can understand and depend on—a future that looks a lot like her parents’ present.

Things are changing too much, too fast. Who can fight God?

What is it in young boys that makes them want to wander off alone and get killed?

There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.

The people I’ve grown up with are falling out of my life, one by one.

And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.

And in dry-as-straw Southern California, it can cause a real orgy of burning.

He’s years older than he was a week ago.

Embrace diversity Or be destroyed.

Maybe I had the wrong idea of rich women. But then, everyone gets lonely.

Slaves did that two hundred years ago. They sneaked around and educated themselves as best they could, sometimes suffering whipping, sale, or mutilation for their efforts.

When I pointed out that Change had no sex at all and wasn’t a person, they were confused, but not dismissive.

The questions little children ask drive you insane because they never stop. But they also make you think.

“the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is to survive until it goes sane again.”

She sounded more scared than anything else. Not hopeful or sorry. Scared. The devil might still be alive.

“Glendale.”

This is not the land. This is Glendale