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Harry thought about it, then spread his hands. "What I'm worried about is spending all our money here, then discovering we can't make it here."

I nodded. "I've thought about that, too, and it bothers me. But it's a possibility anywhere, you know. You could settle in Oregon or Washington, not be able to get a job, and run out of money. Or you could be forced to work under the conditions that Emery and Grayson found. After all, with rivers of people flowing north, looking for work, employers can take their pick, and pay what they feel like paying."

— Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (Earthseed, #1) (Page 323)

The deputies all but ignored Bankole’s story and his questions. They wrote nothing down, claimed to know nothing. They treated Bankole as though they doubted that he even had a sister, or that he was who he said he was. So many stolen IDs these days.

They searched him and took the cash he was carrying. Fees for police services, they said. He had been careful to carry only what he thought would be enough to keep them sweet-tempered, but not enough to make them suspicious or more greedy than they already were. The rest— a sizable packet— he left with me. He trusted me enough to do that. His gun he left with Harry who had gone shopping.

Jail for Bankole could have meant being sold into a period of hard, unpaid labor— slavery. Perhaps if he had been younger, the deputies might have taken his money and arrested him anyway on some trumped-up charge. I had begged him not to go, not to trust any police or government official. It seemed to me such people were no better than gangs with their robbing and slaving.

— Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (Earthseed, #1) (Page 316 - 317)

People are setting more fires to cover crimes— although why they would bother these days, I don’t know. The police are no threat to criminals. People are setting fires to do what our arsonist did last night— to get the neighbors of the arson victim to leave their own homes unguarded. People are setting fires to get rid of whomever they dislike from personal enemies to anyone who looks or sounds foreign or racially different. People are setting fires because they’re frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.

— Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (Earthseed, #1) (Page 143)

The Moss rabbit house is a converted three-car garage added to the property in the 1980s according to Dad. It’s hard to believe any household once had three cars, and gas fueled cars at that. But I remember the old garage before Richard Moss converted it. It was huge with three black oil spots on the floor where three cars had once been housed. Richard Moss repaired the walls and roof, put in windows for cross ventilation, and in general, made the place almost fit for people to live in. In fact, it’s much better than what a lot of people live in now on the outside. He built rows and tiers of cages— hutches— and put in more electric lights and ceiling fans. The fans can be made to work on kid power. He’s hooked them up to an old bicycle frame, and every Moss kid who’s old enough to manage the pedals sooner or later gets drafted into powering the fans. The Moss kids hate it, but they know what they’ll get if they don’t do it.

— Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (Earthseed, #1) (Page 73)

But if Noah is going to be saved, he has plenty of hard work to do.

— Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (Earthseed, #1) (Page 68)

She took 'honour thy father and thy mother' as seriously as any Puritan. But beneath all that good breeding there was fire -- so carefully banked that it was scarcely more than embers, but the fire nevertheless. I saw it flash up in her eyes sometimes when I asked her about her mother, her childhood. The poor girl was so hemmed in by the way she had been brought up that she could scarcely bring herself to meet a grown person in the eye. But when she did . . . oh, then you could see it burning, the hate, and the fear, the love that had twisted and spoiled into something sickening.

— Grey Dog by Elliot Gish (74%)

A good woman. How odd that the phrase has such a particular meaning. One might say "a good man" and mean anything -- there are as many ways of being a good man, it seems, as there are of being a man at all. But there is only one way to be a good woman. It is such a narrow, stunted, blighted way to be that I wonder any woman throughout history has been up to the task. Perhaps none of us ever have.

— Grey Dog by Elliot Gish (93%)

Have you not guessed it yet? I am not a place where nature can be weeded and tamed and kept in order. I am tree roots -- and dark hollows -- and ancient moss -- and the cry of owls. I am not a thing that you can shape, not anymore. I am no garden, but the woods, and if you ever come near me again, every bit o wildness in me will rise up to bite you. I will tear your throat out with my teeth.

— Grey Dog by Elliot Gish (90%)

"No. No, Donner's just a kind of human banister."

"A what?"

"I mean he's like . . . like a symbol of the past for us to hold on to as we're pushed into the future He's nothing. No substance. But having him there, the latest in a two-and-a-half-century-long line of American Presidents make people feel that the country, the culture that they grew up with is still here--that we'll get through these bad times and back to normal."

— Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (Earthseed, #1) (Page 56)