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Sheri S. Tepper Quotes
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Sheri Stewart Tepper was an American writer of science fiction, horror and mystery novels. She was known for feminist science fiction, often with an ecofeminist slant. She employed several pen names, including A. J. Orde, E. E. Horlak, and B. J. Oliphant.

✵ 16. July 1929 – 22. October 2016  •  Other names Sheri Tepper
Sheri S. Tepper: 150 quotes0 likes

Sheri S. Tepper Quotes

““Words? Not really. Mankind is a good word.” She set down her glass with a thump. “Or humankind. I’m afraid we’ve spent a lot of feminist energy on meaningless symbols rather than essential functions.””

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 10 (p. 170)

“Marjorie thought: It always comes down to something like this, doesn’t it. No matter what our consciences say, no matter how much doctrine we’ve been taught, no matter how many ethical considerations we’ve chewed and swallowed and tried to digest, it always comes down to us arming ourselves with weapons as deadly as we can manage and going out into combat…”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 17 (p. 377)

“They haven’t learned that being penitent sometimes does no good at all.”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 16 (p. 374)

“They’ve got a kind of committee there,” he had said, “an office. Acceptable Doctrine, it’s called. Everyone on the committee is mostly concerned about what people believe. They’re running things, too; don’t let them tell you they aren’t. Truth doesn’t enter in. If they’ve decided something is doctrine, they’ll ignore all evidence to the contrary and lie to your face. You don’t want to run afoul of those types, do you? Not if you have questions to ask. No.”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 10 (p. 191)

“Useless as a third leg on a goose.”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 16 (p. 345)

“She needed more sleep and less aggravation.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 6 (p. 114)

“We believe that nothing worthy of our worship would want our worship.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 18 (p. 401)

“The boys attend the Institute. I saw where they keep the girls. They are not taught anything. They are merely fed, bathed, given exercise, raised so until puberty, at which time they are culled. The enemy does not want either rebellion or thought bred into his followers, so any who show signs of independence or unusual intelligence are culled.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 19 (p. 421)

““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.””

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 16 (p. 354)

“Morgot and Myra would tell her there wasn’t any reason to make promises or seek changes because the Great Mother didn’t bargain. The deity didn’t change her mind for women’s convenience. Her way was immutable. As the temple servers said, “No sentimentality, no romance, no false hopes, no self-petting lies, merely that which is!””

Sheri S. Tepper book The Gate to Women's Country

Which left very little room, Stavia thought, for womanly initiative.
Source: The Gate to Women's Country (1988), Chapter 2 (p. 9)

““When your people began to press upon us, long, long ago, we moved into remote enclaves. To us, numbers are not strength; wisdom is strength. What profiteth a race to be numerous and stupid, la? Behold how great we are, saith the lemming!” She laughed.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 18 (p. 392)

“He did a lot of disputation and he always raised his voice when his logic was weak.”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 20 (p. 447)

“Duty was simply not enough. There had to be more than that!”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 20 (p. 446)

“He calls it the university of the Real One, and it teaches only things that are known to be true, which means it is largely devoted to mathematics and sciences.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Elnith in Ch. 46 : nell latimer’s journal, p. 498
The Visitor (2002)

“I mentioned that the small god said she brought the asteroid because of what man had become, and they retorted that man might not have become that if we had been relentless in our education of our young people and had not perpetuated ignorance under the guise of cultural sensitivity and the politically correct.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Elnith in Ch. 46 : nell latimer’s journal, p. 498
The Visitor (2002)

“Your leaders worshipped the greed devil when they sold their votes and influence to spread bad stuff; they worshipped the power devil when they valued votes over the health of the planet; they made a pretence of mercy and justice by advocating human rights while they sucked up to dominance devils whose law was torture and whose rule was the enslavement of women.”

Sheri S. Tepper

The Visitor in Ch. 44 : the visitor, pp. 461-462
The Visitor (2002)

“Aside from earning their livings, what did your people do, mostly? Games. Sports. Casinos. Loud machines that went fast. Shopping. Lawsuits blaming other for whatever went wrong. What did they believe in? Conspiracy theories. Racial superiority. Heroes with superpowers. Faith healers. God-loves-you religions. State-supported lotteries. All that enormous energy expended to conquer nothing at all, stadia full of people watching no conquering going on. For every scientist or person in government who really tried to conquer, there were a thousand people buying lottery tickets, drinking beer, watching football, and growing old.”

Sheri S. Tepper

The Visitor in Ch. 44 : the visitor, pp. 460-461
The Visitor (2002)

“Each race creates its own devils. You had so many that they specialized. Devils of racial hatred, devils of greed and violence. Devils who killed their own people in orgies of blood. Devils who bombed clinics, devils who bombed school buses, devils who bombed other devils. I got to know every one of them by name. As soon as I arrived, I sent my monsters out to kill them all. They had tarnished my reputation, and though I have lavished much care on mankind, vengeance is mine.”

Sheri S. Tepper

The small god in Ch. 44 : the visitor, p. 458
The Visitor (2002)

“Once the Regime said that one living cell is a life, real living became irrelevant.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Flower in Ch. 37 : leaving bastion, p. 355
The Visitor (2002)

“If a society thinks it needs weapons, it must accept killing. If it thinks it needs violent men, it must accept rapine and assault.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Colonel Doctor Jens Ladislav in Ch. 32 : dismé in hold, p. 283
The Visitor (2002)

“Call me either Colonel or Doctor. Hearing both titles gives me a split personality, the two philosophies differing so widely. It is medicine’s philosophy that lives should be saved, of all sorts. It is our military’s philosophy that as long as a few cells are kept alive, actual lives may be dispensed with. A few inches of gut in a bottle is not, to my mind, a life, no matter what theological contortions one puts oneself through.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Colonel Doctor Jens Ladislav in Ch. 30 : dismé and the doctor, p. 256
The Visitor (2002)

“They were always telling me their way is the only way to go!”

Sheri S. Tepper

“Oh, no, my dear. No, not at all. So long as it harms no one else, one’s own way is always preferable.”

Dismé and Arnole in Ch. 7 : dismé the maiden, p. 59
The Visitor (2002)

“She had grown through loss and confusion into a girl who lived almost entirely inside her head, taking refuge in the places she created there, not so much repulsed by others’ reality as unable to perceive it.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Visitor (2002), Ch. 7 : dismé the maiden, p. 57

“Being an immortal doesn’t matter to me. If one looks out into the universe and perceives what true immortality would mean in terms of time and space, it takes monstrous hubris to even conceive of personal immortality, much less desire it.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Nell Latimer in Ch. 6 : nell latimer’s book, p. 51
The Visitor (2002)

“I am myself, though from moment to moment something else seems to be looking on. Whatever will be required of me, however, can best be done if I remember who I am.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Guardian Camwar in Ch. 4 : the cooper, pp. 42-43
The Visitor (2002)

“Long ago, the people of the world cried out for help. In the reaches of heaven their cry was heard, and a Visitor came in answer to it. The Visitor began helping immediately, but secretly. Now the visitor intends to be known to the people of the world and the people of the world must deal with that knowledge.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Guardian Camwar in Ch. 4 : the cooper, p. 41
The Visitor (2002)

“Many men of importance were gathered there to be seen talking with other men of importance, resulting in an abundance of conspicuous but immaterial discourse.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Visitor (2002), Ch. 4 : the cooper, p. 40

“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.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 49, p. 391

“We would prefer to believe them, and we’ve gone along with them when they’ve told us the predators are a separate people, races that eat other intelligent life and who do not, therefore, eat Republicans. Or newsmen.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 44, pp. 335-336

“The world had been repeatedly swept by war and famine and plague when the population had been a quarter of what it was now! Less than a hundred years ago. Sparse population didn’t equal peace. It never had. All it meant were fewer casualties.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 43, p. 322

“It is far more important to establish a civil and orderly society than it is to pander to abusive cultural and religious artifacts.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 41, p. 293

“He thinks he’s a liberal, he’s generally on our side, but he’s also ex-military, and he falls for the national security gambit every time someone plays it. Star Wars. Stealth anything. 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. So long as Old Glory’s whipping in the breeze, it’s okay to deal guns to kids and cheat on your taxes.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 39, p. 283

“Military men! Damn it, they always thought in terms of hardware, black or white, our side or the other side. It was damned hard to get them to see gray at all, and getting them to tell dark gray from medium gray was impossible!”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 12, p. 125

“Some professor of history wrote that 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

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 9, pp. 102-103

“If a person torturing and killing people is evil, why are gods who torture and kill people called good?”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 9, p. 102

“One of the strangest things I have encountered on your world, dear Benita, is that many of your people have no idea who they really are but many ridiculous ideas about what they are expected to be, plus many religious convictions about what they should be, although nobody is! One should not want to be anything but what one is because it creates unhappiness.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 5, p. 57

“Thinking it over later, she blamed TV and the movies for her immediate reaction. The media gobbled everything that happened or could happen, then spit it out, over and over, every idea regurgitated, every concept so mushed up that when anything remarkable actually occurred it was already a cliché. Like cloning or surrogate mothers or extraterrestrials and UFOs. The whole world had heard about it and seen movies about it, and had become bored with the subject before it even happened!”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 2, p. 8

“Words? Not really. Mankind is a good word.”

Sheri S. Tepper

She set down her glass with a thump. “Or humankind. I’m afraid we’ve spent a lot of feminist energy on meaningless symbols rather than essential functions.”
Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 10, p. 170

“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.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Colonel Doctor Jens Ladislav in Ch. 33 : dezmai of the drums, p. 294
The Visitor (2002)

“Personal beliefs are unarguable, even if the other side has all the facts.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Nell Latimer in Ch. 6 : nell latimer’s book, p. 51
The Visitor (2002)

“The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 46, p. 358

“We always assume that living, breathing, sensible creatures want peace.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 29, p. 217

“The lustful who punish beauty would be wiser to control lust.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 24, p. 181

“Don’t you find that predators are those who most often assert absolute rights to personal freedoms?”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 23, p. 170

“When agony is not present, no matter how imminent it looms, painful change must come from outside. This is a truth.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 20, p. 157

“People don’t seem to rob bookstores much, more’s the pity for them.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 8, p. 88

“No one ever has to believe! The universe is, it does not require belief. Do you think it will stop existing if you do not believe? Do you think far galaxies will harbor resentment against you if you do not believe? Do you resent the ant who does not look up and admire you? Never!”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: Singer from the Sea (1999), Chapter 24, “People from the Sea” (p. 382)

“You felt something huge and marvelous of which you are part, and in the moments you described, you forgot yourself for you were one with your world and with the sky above it, and even the stars looking down. There is nothing larger or more wonderful than that. Still, there are those who would prefer self. They will accept any belief, no matter how foolish, if it guarantees them personal immortality. I know people like that. But there are others who know themselves well enough to realize how limiting that is.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: Singer from the Sea (1999), Chapter 24, “People from the Sea” (p. 382)

“I know you want me to believe all this, but it seems little different from the religious stories we learned in school, esoteric and relatively pointless.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: Singer from the Sea (1999), Chapter 23, “The Marae Morehu” (p. 370)

“But how is it you know all this about how large the ocean is? I thought you girls were limited to pretty chatter and the economics of housekeeping. I didn’t know you learned geography.”

Sheri S. Tepper

“We don’t,” she said, somewhat shamefaced. “But we learned to read, and once one can read, one can learn anything.”
Source: Singer from the Sea (1999), Chapter 17, “Merdune Lagoon” (p. 272)