I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.

I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.

Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

All that you touchYou Change.All that you ChangeChanges you.The only lasting truthis Change.Godis Change.

God is Change.Earthseed: The Books of the LivingLauren Oya Olamina

In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.

Spring can still be felteven if you lay under the bedFrozen heart can meltin coldness when wintry love misled

Healthy personalities accept themselves not in any self-idolizing way but in the sense that they see themselves as persons who are worth giving to another and worthy to receive from another.

Our lack of forgiveness makes us hate, and our lack of compassion makes us hard-hearted. Pride in our hearts makes us resentful and keeps our memory in a constant whirlwind of passion and self-pity.

Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty there is someone who quivers inside me.

Well, I was about six or seven, and my mother and father separated.

I work for posterity, these things requiring ages for their accomplishment.

People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it's an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security.

Mask your brightness. Be at one with the dust of the earth. This is primal union.

From the moment you are born, you could die. I think as an artist it is important to meditate on that.

The good of our present state is merely comparative, and the evil which every man feels will be sufficient to disturb and harass him if he does not know how much he escapes.