Sheri S. Tepper Quotes

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

It's exactly the way we thought and acted. Men didn't have to be better! At least, not in terms of western thought, he didn't. He strutted and crowed and told himself just as he was, he was made in the image of God! It was easier to depend on heaven than be responsible on earth, but humans were divinely created so why worry."
"And you don't believe he was? Human?"
"He wasn't what I thought of as sapiens. In my opinion, very few of us were sapiens. Maybe none of us were. Maybe we'd had a chance of becoming sapiens, but we threw it away."
"When did mankind do that?"
"In Nela's time, I think. It was then that pitiful people who saw no reality and knew no science declared the holiness of reproduction. And while the liberals were preserving the right to beget, the reactionaries were preserving the faults in our gene pool. We could corrupt and destroy all the rest of creation, but our own germ plasm was sacred. It didn't matter that there were billions of us, but anything sapiens about us was far more threatened by our numbers than by any change we might make in ourselves.…"

Sam grew up to be both dutiful and willful, a boy who would say yes to avoid trouble but then do as he pleased.

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.

Wisdom, growled the Agirul. "Painful, isn't it? We assume so much and resist learning to the contrary."

They were betrayed, Oracle. Ganver tells me there is no anger greater than that of a zealot betrayed.

My grandfather said people who can learn, learn morality the way they learn everything else, by building on history. He also said that some people cannot learn from history, so they cannot change. For them, there’s only one book or tradition or whatever it’s called in their religion, and in that book God is eternal and whatever the book says God commanded two or three or four thousand years ago, God still commands today. That may be kill homosexuals or kill nonbelievers. It may say enslave your enemies. It may say mutilate or sequester women, or sell your ten-year-old daughter for somebody’s third wife.

This led me to the thought that it might be easy to pretend to be a Seer. After all, if one pretended to have visions of the far distant future, how would anyone know if they came true or not?

The sergeant was braver than most, and stupider—the two qualities often going hand in hand.

I suspect there’s little difference between whim and inspiration at the beginning of any chain of events. It’s what happens later that tells us which is which.

"Oh, but I am soiled beyond all cleansing.…"
"Nonsense," said Mavin impatiently. "You are silly beyond all belief, but that is your sole sin I am aware of, young man."

Though he was very young, only in his early twenties, he had enormous charisma. This attribute alone made him believable in the way that actors and demagogues are believable: he was so overwhelmingly convincing he was never required to demonstrate relevance.

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.

"I don't have much confidence," she said. "A lot of what I've been taught isn't making sense."
"That's the nature of teaching. Something happens, and intelligence first apprehends it, then makes up a rule about it, then tries to pass the rule along. Very small beings invariably operate in that way. However, by the time the information is passed on, new things are happening that the old rule doesn't fit. Eventually intelligence learns to stop making rules and understand the flow."

Lately I feel that I'm living in a badly written, badly directed foreign movie that's running on late-night TV in black-and-white with lots of static and inadequate subtitles.