Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2)

by Octavia E. Butler

It was a familiar sort of story—horrible and ordinary. Almost everyone in Acorn has a horrible, ordinary story to tell.

People are still impressed, even intimidated, by bound, official-looking books. Verses, handwritten or printed out on sheets of paper just don’t grab them the way a book does. Even people who can’t read are impressed by books. The idea seems to be, “If it’s in a book, maybe it’s true,” or even, “If it’s in a book, it must be true.”

We’re sliding into undirected negative change, and what’s worse, we’re getting used to it. All too often, we shape ourselves and our futures in such stupid ways.

When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves.

There was a mindless rigidity about some Christian Americans—about the ones who did the most harm. They were so certain that they were right that, like medieval inquisitors, they would kill you, even torture you to death, to save your soul.

The purpose of Christian America was to make America the great, Christian country that it was supposed to be, to prepare it for a future of strength, stability, and world leadership, and to prepare its people for life everlasting in heaven. Yet sometimes now when I think about Christian America and all that it did when it held power over so many lives, I don’t think about order and stability or greatness or even places like Camp Christian or Pelican Bay. I think about the other extremes, the many small, sad, silly extremes that made up so much of Christian American life. I think about a little girl’s doll and I try to banish the shadows of panic that I still can’t help feeling when I see one.

There are times when I wish I believed in hell—other than the hells we make for one another, I mean.

People do blame you for the things they do to you.

You could never be altogether sure what another person might feel as a humiliation or an invasion of privacy.

I suppose that I’ll be learning what to do and how to do it until the day I die.

Not that I ever had a choice in the matter. If you want a thing—truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible.