Sheri S. Tepper Quotes

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.

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

Why are we wondering why the world wishes itself dead when we are doing nothing to heal it?

The tallest Father preached. He stood before us in robes of gleaming white, surrounded by the smoke of sweet incense, fondling his groin from time to time as he talked of St. Phallus. St. Phallus loomed behind the altar, erect, massive, as though ready to rape the world. It was not the first such monument I had seen. Wherever men were ignorant and hungry for power, I had seen these things, though never one as large as this. Father fondled his groin and preached.
“Holy fruit of St. Phallus,” he said.
“Clean seed planted in filthy ground,” he said.
“Corrupted by dirty woman-wombs,” he said.

I will never love anyone who is not first my friend. I wonder if you could be my friend.

We of Betand do not change our laws readily, so says my father, but we interpret them to our needs.

Handling surplus population is a perpetual challenge, said Onsofruct. Has it not been written that the poor are always with us?"
Questioner shook her head. "Handling surplus men isn't that difficult. Just start a lively war or find some new frontier—there's always dangerous work that needs doing. If that fails, one can create lethal rites of passage to kill off batches at a time. One needn't pretend, not with men. The gang chief or general simply talks them into a fury and sends them into battle, and then gives them a medal after they're maimed or dead. Or, the employer gets them to use up their lives in a factory and then tosses them aside with a memento and an inadequate pension. Team spirit does the rest.

old vengeance is like old cake: still seeming sweet, but so dry that one invariably chokes on it.

I think I mentioned to you that there've been some rumors about where certain soft contributions to senatorial campaigns come from. Dink works for Morse. Morse gets lots of soft money. This has got to be where it's coming from."
"What does Morse do in return?"
"He votes for the war on drugs. Votes more money for the DEA. Makes sure there's no drug policy reform. The War on Drugs keeps the market up, keeps the dealers working, keeps the money flowing. They don't want drugs legalized. It'd be like what happened when we stopped Prohibition. The gangsters didn't want it stopped. They made millions.

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.

Mother, though of Gamesman caste, seemed to have no Talent of any kind. She was so beautiful she did not need to be anything else.

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.

That's why we train women judges here at Temple. It is the nature of men to make rules for everything and to play complicated games with them. For them, the game is more important than justice.
"Ordinary people prefer justice. They prefer that things be taken case by case, they prefer an attempt at justice over the rules of law, for they know that pure law is often used by the clever to victimize the innocent.

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

It is our minds and not any other attribute which gives us personhood and value. We share intelligence with other living things, and they are no less important than we. Even creatures without detectable intelligence have adapted themselves to play necessary roles. To make God in our image or we in God’s is blasphemy.