Quotes from Sheri S. Tepper

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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?

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….

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.

If the law does not do justice, the people will mock the law.

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

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.

Grass! Millions of square miles of it. . . . a hundred rippling oceans, each ripple a gleam of scarlet or amber, emerald or turquoise. . . . the colors shivering over the prairies. . . . Sapphire seas of grass with dark islands of grass bearing great plumy trees which are grass again.

Existe el jardín. Y existe la cizaña. ¡Y a menos que seas despiadado, la cizaña siempre gana!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.