Octavia Butler quotes - page 6
When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.
Octavia Butler
Tomas stopped and looked at the three Oankali. "Do you believe in spirits?”
"We believe in life,” Ahajas said.
"Life after death?”
Ahajas smoothed her tentacles briefly in agreement. "When I'm dead,” she said, "I will nourish other life.”
"But I mean-”
"If I died on a lifeless world, a world that could sustain some form of life if it were tenacious enough, organelles within each cell of my body would survive and evolve. In perhaps a thousand million years, that world would be as full of life as this one.”
"...it would?”
"Yes. Our ancestors have seeded a great many barren worlds that way. Nothing is more tenacious than the life we are made of. A world of life from apparent death, from dissolution. That's what we believe in.”
"Nothing more?”.
Octavia Butler
