Famous Quotes & Sayings

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes & Sayings

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Famous Quotes By Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1922757

The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 903928

To me, fantasy has always been the genre of escape, science fiction the genre of ideas. So if you can escape and have a little idea as well, maybe you have some kind of a cross-breed between the two. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 366079

As vocabulary is reduced , so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language he retrogresses! — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 166858

Near the Mexican border, rocky canyons cleave the mountains, laying them aside like broken wedges of gray cheese furred with a dark mold of pinon and juniper that sheds hard shadows on moon glazed stone, etched lithographs in gray and black, taupe and silver. Beneath feathery chamisa a rattlesnake flicks his tongue, following a scent. Along a precarious rock ledge a ring-tailed cat strolls, nose snuffling the cracks. At the base of the stone a peccary trots along familiar foot trails, toward the toes of a higher cliff where a seeping spring gathers in a rocky goblet. In the desert, sounds are dry and rattling: pebbles toed into cracks, hoofs tac-tacking on stone, the serpent rattle warning the wild pig to veer away, which she does with a grunt to the tribe behind her. From the rocky scarp the ring-tailed cat hears the whole population of the desert pass about its business in the canyon below. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1734406

Though this new forest grew mightily, elsewhere the mighty jungles fell. Elsewhere the coastal rain forests that furred the body of the world were torn and riven. Elsewhere the last of the old growth the last of the world's own garment were ripped away. It was in this time, now, that the mother of us all was stripped naked and left to die in shame of her children, she who had been robed in glory like this, adorned like this. I bent my head upon the roots and wept, sorrowing for the trees. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1989204

Recent history takes a while to set. People really don't know what just happened. They only figure it out later. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1288326

The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1011927

And in the end, unable to feel terror, mankind will go, we will all go down, down, down to happyland. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1940335

Talk about burning the flag and he gets all choked up. Funny, so many of these guys think the country stands for the flag instead of the other way around. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1395817

If the law does not do justice, the people will mock the law. Vess — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1389475

Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day's receipts. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1080155

Once we're grown, all we can hear are what the poet described: the echoes, dying. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1182290

HECUBA: I had a knife in my skirt, Achilles. When Talthybius bent over me, I could have killed him. I wanted to. I had the knife just for that reason. Yet, at the last minute I thought, he's some mother's son just as Hector was, and aren't we women all sisters? If I killed him, I thought, wouldn't It be like killing family?Wouldn't it be making some other mother grieve? So I didn't kill him, but if I had, I might have saved Hector's child. Dead or damned, that's the choice we make. Either you men kill us and are honored for it, or we women kill you and are damned for it. Dead or damned. Women don't have to make choices like that in Hades. There is no love there, nothing to betray. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 834316

When one's world was impermanent, difficult endeavors, like procuring justice or balancing the ecology, need never be attempted. One need only make contributions to the ascendant hierarchy, cast one's eyes heavenward with an awed and anticipatory expression, while continuing to behave as selfishly as one liked. When everything is going to go pop, one needn't bother to provide for or preserve for the grandchildren. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1484234

What do I have to say to the universe? A soul ought to have something to say to the universe if it's going to be immortal. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1632221

[T]he scripture worshippers put the writings ahead of God. Instead of interpreting God's actions in nature, for example, they interpret nature in the light of the Scripture. Nature says the rock is billions of years old, but the book says different, so even though men wrote the book, and God made the rock and God gave us minds that have found ways to tell how old it is, we still choose to believe the Scripture. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 879449

No sentimentality, no romance, no false hope, no self-petting lies, merely that which is! — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1473370

The sooner we can separate salvageable skeptics from self-righteous absolutists, the sooner we can move along. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1133529

We're so old that the winds of age echo along our ribs and pick at our eye sockets. We could be gone tomorrow. A chill, say, or a little slip on the cliff side. I feel as fragile as a dried flower. I rattle a little in the moving air, but I'm only coherent dust-a shape of what once was. My essence is going. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1871398

I think ... girls have a hard time being interesting. It's actually easier to be famous, or notorious, than it is to be interesting. In our world, girls climb very well until they hit puberty-sexual maturity-and then they begin to fall out of the tree. They start role-playing instead of thinking, flirting instead of learning. They start admiring how smart the boys are-or how athletic or how handsome-instead of concentrating on their own intelligence. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 770040

It has a quality other countries call cultural imperialism, which, we have found, means a tasty culture that other peoples readily enjoy, an infective culture, if you will, from which ideas and usages spread quickly. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 319092

Men are biological. Women are biological. We pretend our minds are in control, but that's a very tenuous control at best, and a civilized society can't be built on uncontrolled biology. I see it in my work: intelligence betrayed by lust, by jealousy, by macho ownership; otherwise trustworthy men who can't be trusted at all around women, or vice versa. Hell, look at Congress. Well-intentioned, progressive, admired law-makers who end up losing it all because they can't control how they react to women! And I certainly don't trust most women around men — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 2093164

Do you realize it's been only a century that we've been able to go from house to car to office to car to wherever, with the heater on, and the defroster on, protected from the rain and the cold? It hasn't been much longer than that we've had lighting for streets. Think of all that darkness, all that world out there, all that mystery that we've turned into well-lighted concrete bunkers, safe and warm and dull. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 578011

There is nothing so delightful, so pure, so innocent or enjoyable that some group has not forbidden it. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 287081

Do you know of the uncertainty principle, Marjorie?" "I am educated," she snorted, very much annoyed with him. "Then you know that with very small things, we cannot both know where they are and what they are doing. The act of observing them always changes what they are doing. Perhaps God does not look at us individually because to do so would interrupt our work, interfere with our free will ... . — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 898423

Conflict acting on intelligence creates imagination. Faced with conflict, creatures are forced to imagine what will happen, where the next threat will come from. If there has never been conflict, imagination never develops. Wits arise in answer to danger, to pain, to tragedy. No one ever got smarter eating easy apples. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1713898

Science fiction still is an idea genre. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 2056950

With us the inner nature accords with the outer expectation. The body follows the mind, and the mind seeks the soul, which it strives toward but has not yet won. With you it is otherwise. The mind follows the body in pursuit of the soul you have been told you already have. Because you cannot find it, you assume you have lost it somewhere in your past, and this keeps you from achieving it in your future. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1732437

To the Chasmites, truth is determined by how well it fits their expectations, and doesn't that sound familiar? ... They have consistently refused to have a god contest, and I fear they will have to encounter the godlet rather forcibly before they believe there is anything there at all. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 2263412

A bird cried jubilation. In that moment they lived long. All minor motions were stilled and only the great ones were perceived. Beneath them the earth turned, singing. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1753645

In that look was such love and uncritical adoration as a god might instill into a new create. "Except, how boring at last," he thought. "To have one always, always adoring one. But perhaps gods do not get bored ... — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1525085

Cultures define their gods when they're young and primitive, when their main concern is survival. They endow their gods with survival characteristics like omnipotence and authoritarianism, belligerence and suspicion, and that's what goes into all their myths or scriptures. Then, if they survive long enough, they begin to develop morality. They examine their own history, and they learn that authoritarianism doesn't accord with free will, that belligerence and suspicion are unhealthful, but this newly moral culture is stuck with its bigoted, interfering gods, plus it's stuck with people who prefer the old bloody gods and use them as their justification for doing all kinds of awful things. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1603813

They will set aside what they have believed about the world, divesting themselves of all preconceptions, all judgments ... They will do it, then they will send their minds out to seek the truth. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1541458

along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a soft, early spring rain. On either side the gutters ran with an infant chuckle and gurgle, baby streams being amused with themselves. The — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1578305

Only fools insist upon life at any cost ... Others would say that life may be laid down when it becomes too heavy. Where does it go, after all, but into the keeping of the Powers who gave it and will give it once again? — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1766813

They make a mess," Jared told her. "Tulip foliage dies and turns an ugly yellow. Pansies aren't hardy. The bloom stalks on lavender drop their buds. Violets seed themselves." His tone of voice made it clear that seeding oneself was a perversion. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1773638

One listened and one remembered. I listened as best I could, but there were no hooks in my head to hang much of it on. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1796756

Preferring actual ignorance to the appearance of it, he did not ask. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1817761

For it would be only for a time. Until what he knew and thought became no longer relevant or necessary and was forgotten. But that was the same with all of us. We were only what we were for a time, at that time. Then our own silver began to mix with the tin of our future to change us. I knew this to be so and grieved for Windlow while I grieved for me. In time I would not be this Peter, even as I now was not the peter of two years ago ... Yet that Peter was not lost. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1934806

Man was always being jerked around between different people's ideas of god, depending on who'd won the most recent war, or palace coup, or political battle. This meant mankind was always being asked to accept deities foreign to his own nature. I mean, if your prophet was sexually insecure, or if his later interpreters were, that religion demanded celibacy or repression or hatred of women; if the prophet was a homophobe, he preached prosecution of homosexuals; and if he was both lecherous and greedy, he preached polygeny. If he was luxurious, he preached give-me-money-and-God-will-make-you-rich; if he felt put upon he preached God-of-Vengeance, let's kill the other guy; and no matter how much well-meaning ecumenicists pretended all the gods were one god under different aspects, they weren't any such thing, because every prophet created God in his own image, to confront his own nightmares. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1951762

The ancient lizard mind lies below the mammalian mind, which lies below a primate mind, which is modified by a mind adapted to language, and since these layers have developed in response to differing evolutionary pressures, they often do not function efficiently together. Human civility tries to control ape dominance, human rationality tries to control mammalian sexuality, human social conscience tries to ameliorate reptilian greed, never with total success. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1957864

He told us that nations of men fell into disorder, so nations of law were set up instead. He told us that nations of law then forgot justice and let the law become a Game, a Game in which the moves and the winning were more important than truth. He told us to seek justice rather than the Game. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 2010892

Whoever declares another heretic is himself a devil. Whoever places a relic or artifact above justice, kindness, mercy, or truth is himself a devil and the thing elevated is a work of evil magic. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 2021821

Sitting down and weeping is what women have done for centuries, and it has done no good at all. Nor praying. God has given us the earth. He is not waiting in the next room, ready to fix it for us if we ruin it. If we do not care for it, no one will. On other worlds, other races of men perhaps do better than we have done. He cares for us, but he does not control what we do. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 2027721

Any do-gooder can save one life or a dozen by spending x dollars, but that doesn't demonstrate anything unless you've got x dollars multiplied by the total number of lives that need saving. Stopping poverty one victim at a time is like mowing a lawn one blade at a time. The problem grows faster than the cure can be applied, the only people who profit are the agencies who claim to be cutting grass while they're actually applying fertilizer. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 2038440

I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 2122476

Only mavericks live in accordance with their desires, and even they don't often get away with it. They are usually labeled as troublemakers and gotten rid of. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 2193574

Our lives are made up of many things, not just one. Many answers, not just one. It's men that want one answer for everything. They're always making laws, as though they could make one law that would be just in all cases. They can't. They never have. I think men get derailed, sometime during their growing up. Instead of settling for what's honest and real and sort of thoughtful, they go off on these quests. They go strutting and crowing, waving their weapons and shouting their battle cries. They say they're seeking something higher, but it always seems to end in pain, doesn't it? — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 2206101

Not many years before the Happening, one of your country's largest religious bodies officially declared that their book was holier than their God, thus simultaneously and corporately breaking several commandments of their own religion, particularly the first one. Of course they liked the book better! It was full of magic and contradictions that they could quote to reinforce their bigoted and hateful opinions, as I well know, for I chose many parts of it from among the scrolls and epistles that were lying around in caves here and there. They're correct that a god picked out the material; they just have the wrong god doing it.
(The small god in Ch. 44) — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 2248877

The expression of divinity is in variety. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 118386

There are writers who say they have no social responsibility except to write a good book, but that doesn't satisfy me. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 900327

Man constantly prayed to God for peace, but peace never happened, so he decided that his god must really want war because the other side was sinful. Man invented and extolled virtues which could only be exemplified under conditions of war, like heroism and gallantry and honor, and he gave himself laurel wreaths or booty or medals for such things, thus rewarding himself for behaving well while sinning. He did it when he was a primitive, and he went on with it after he thought he was civilized. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 204301

Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 228335

In a society as mobile as your own, many people are totally anonymous to those around them. They do not care what they do before strangers or to strangers. If one feels no shame, punishment only angers. If one feels shame, punishment is almost unnecessary. Logically, therefore, your prisons should seek to instill shame, but even if it were possible, it would offend your civil libertarians to do so. "Shaming" others is considered an affront to their dignity. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 264759

Along the Oregon coast an arm of the Pacific shushes softly against rocky shores. Above the waves, dripping silver in the moonlight, old trees, giant trees, few now, thrust their heads among low clouds, the moss thick upon their boles and shadow deep around their roots. In these woods nights are quiet, save for the questing hoot of an owl, the satin stroke of fur against a twig, the tick and rasp of small claws climbing up, clambering down. In these woods, bear is the big boy, the top of the chain, but even he goes quietly and mostly by day. It is a place of mosses and liverworts and ferns, of filmy green that curtains the branches and cushions the soil, a wet place, a still place. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 274946

The sidesaddle was designed to protect a maiden's virginity, while risking the maiden's neck. Rather much for rather little, I thought. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 299772

Power is power as the sun is the sun, the wind is the wind. The villager blesses the rain as it falls on his crops; the pillager uses it to cover his approach. It is the wielder who determines the good or evil. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 327830

We live in a time like dreaming ... The edges of our lives flutter and change as we watch them. Listen to the dream. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 375119

The Regime has become so smug it can't tell the difference among the revolutionary, the innovative, or the merely various. The high command knows so little about the outside that if I came back with a fully equipped chemical laboratory and told them I'd found it in a cave, they'd probably believe that, so long as I brought it back peicmeal in my saddle bags, thus proving I hadn't known it was there beforehand. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 475970

Boys play with death as though it were a game, cutting their teeth on daggers. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 575810

We'll tell him his mother waits for him in heaven, I suppose."
"Is that a lie?"
"It's what we tell fools and children." She sighed. "Postulating a heaven gives man an out for having been unable to retain the paradise he was given here on earth. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 675038

Often we wish to be exorcised of demons we ourselves have allowed house room. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 710802

It may be important to write a book that doesn't come up to what I would like to have rather than to write no book at all. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 717376

Stavia saw herself as in a picture, from the outside, a darkly cloaked figure moving along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a soft, early spring rain. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 760562

I have always lived in a world in which I'm just a spot in history. My life is not the important point. I'm just part of the continuum, and that continuum, to me, is a marvelous thing. The history of life, and the history of the planet, should go on and on and on and on. I cannot conceive of anything in the universe that has more meaning than that.
[Sheri S. Tepper: Speaking to the Universe, Locus Magazine, September 1998] — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 783246

When a response is detected, the thing that uttered moves separately but implacably toward its responder, as by gravity. So equivalence is drawn to equivalence until they are within touching distance. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 788119

Perhaps it is meant to be hard. Perhaps there are some things so previous that one can only be tested when one is asked to give them up. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1503228

Am saying that perhaps God has already done his intervening by creating us. Perhaps He intends us to do what we keep praying He will do. Having designed us for a particular task, he has sent us into battle. We do not particularly enjoy the battle, so we keep begging him to let us off. He pays no attention because He does not keep track of us individually. He does not know where in the body we are or how many of us there are. He does not check to see whether we despair or persevere. Only if the body of the universe is healed will he know whether we have done what we were sent to do! — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 901274

We are made of the stuff of stars, given our lives by a living world, given our selves by time. We are brother to the trees and sister to the sun. We are of such glorious stuff we need not carry pain around like a label. Our duty, as living things, to be sure that pain is not our whole story, for we can choose to be otherwise. As Ellin says, we can choose to dance. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1010893

Bao is the acceptance that mankind is part of the fabric of the universe, not the purpose of it. Humanity is meant to live as part of creation, not as the owner of it or to make war against it. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1093944

(ghost of)ACHILLES: How can I force obedience on this? In other times I've used the fear of death to make a woman bow herself to me. If not the fear of her own death, then fear for someone else, a husband or a child. How can I bend this woman to my will?
(ghost of)POLYXENA: I think I will not bend.
IPHIGENIA: You see, it's as we've tried to tell you, Great Achilles. Women are no good to you dead. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1104703

It's not what your reproductive organs do that counts, it's what your mind intends before that moment. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1134610

Well, strangeness was hard to think about. Wonder grazes you like a bullet; it zips by and is gone, and all you really perceive is the zing as it goes past, or maybe the pain if it comes too close. It does no good to search for whatever it was, for it never lodges anywhere you can get a good look at it. The truly strange has no hooks of familiarity that one can catch hold of. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1141154

Creation has the truth written all over it - the age of the universe, the history of the world - but nine-tenths of mankind either don't know it or think it's a sham, because it isn't what their book or their prophet says, and it isn't cozy or manipulable enough. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1169355

I tell you, lad, that men will believe is one says, "The Gods say ... " They will believe if one says, "I had a Vision ... " They will believe if one says, "It was told me on a tablet of hidden gold ... " But, if one says, "History teaches," then they will not believe. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1170904

In secrecy, in silence, a whole race may be destroyed without notice. Whole cultures and species have been destroyed while men smiled and spoke of economics, of employment, of progress, of the welfare of mankind. Is a threat less deadly because it does not scream and rage and threaten force of arms? — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1214265

if a being has sufficient sense of justice and civility to know it has done wrong, knowing it has done wrong is often sufficient punishment. If the being has no remorse, punishment will only increase its anger. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1242164

Our ancestors have much to answer for.
Why? What did they do?
... Long ago, they used machines and drugs to keep the unhealthy and unfit ones of us alive. In that past time it was believed that all persons must have children. It was a right deemed so precious that it was forced upon even those who did not value it or should not have had it. If one of our people became pregnant, our people used all their knowledge to assure the young would be born, no matter how sick or disabled. Then, if the young lived, they injected them and dosed them and radiated them and transfused and transplanted them, to keep them alive, and then, when they were grown, they used all their skills in assisting them to have children of their own. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1275882

Men like to think well of themselves, and poets help them do it. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1292465

The only difference between a futile madman and an effective tyrant is power and will. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1456587

All around the Mediterranean you'll find cultures that believe men can't control themselves and shouldn't have to try. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1457001

No aristocrat would sit in the wild grass to dream. Aristocrats have gardens for that, if they dream at all. — Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes 1500884

I'm not sure a world run by women would be any better. They're human beings! — Sheri S. Tepper