Wild Seed (Patternmaster, #1)

by Octavia E. Butler

“What is seed?” she asked. “People too valuable to be casually killed,” he said.

She did not yet realize that she had walked away from that independence when she walked away from her people with him.

Thus, when her enemies came to kill her, she knew more about surviving than they did about killing.

I could not live in a place where being myself would mean being thought a slave.”

Civilization is the way one’s own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.”

Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.

“You were always one to overprotect children,” he commented. “I only allow them to be children for as long as they will,” she said. “They will grow up and learn of sorrow and evil quickly enough.”