Sheri S. Tepper: Doing

Sheri S. Tepper was American fiction writer. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Sheri S. Tepper: 300   quotes 0   likes

“Watch bullies at school. See how they delight in causing pain. See how little is done to change them. Imagine them grown, elected, put into power. They do grow, they are elected, they are put into power.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Strange Horizons interview (2008)
Context: Every villain or villainous activity I have ever written about is a person or an activity that has actually lived or taken place. I invent nothing. When I wrote in Raising the Stones about the slavery practiced by one race and their reasons for it, those reasons were taken verbatim from arguments written in defense of Negro slavery by southern slave owners. Watch bullies at school. See how they delight in causing pain. See how little is done to change them. Imagine them grown, elected, put into power. They do grow, they are elected, they are put into power.

Pain , School , Imagination , Change

“They're correct that a god picked out the material; they just have the wrong god doing it.”

Sheri S. Tepper

The Visitor (2002)
Context: 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 : the visitor

God

“The first thing you’ve got to do is tell yourself that the shitheads are wrong…Not just a little bit wrong, but irremediably, absolutely, and endemically wrong. Nothing you can say or do will stop their being wrong. They’re damned to eternal wrongness, and that’s God’s will.”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 7 (pp. 140-141)

God

“What’s coming is reality. Politics has nothing to do with reality!”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 14 (p. 269)

Reality

“Honor is only a label they use for what they want you to do, Chernon. They want you to stay, so they call staying honorable.”

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

Source: The Gate to Women's Country (1988), Chapter 14 (p. 149)

““Show yourselves,” cried Stephon. “Only cowards hide in the dark.”
“Cowards do many things,” said the voice. “Cowards kill their Commanders and make it look like a bandit attack. Cowards plot in secret. Cowards breed insurrection. Cowards plan the abuse of women.””

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

Source: The Gate to Women's Country (1988), Chapter 34 (p. 302)

Women , Secret

“Look at Mother Teresa. She spent her whole life being holy. She didn't benefit anyone in any real sense. She didn't work on stopping disease, helping poverty, doing anything that would relieve the condition of her countrymen. She just went around the city, picked up dying people, and took care of them while they died. It was a good thing, no doubt, but it meant no betterment, no progress, no help, no relief from pain. She longed to be holy. She wanted to be a saint. Now she's a saint.
Salk isn't a saint. But he did more for the human race than Mother Teresa did. He didn't long to be holy, which meant having faith, not asking questions, doing something unpleasant without thought or complaint. He longed to do good, which meant finding things out, asking hard questions, and thinking hard, deep thoughts. Goodness and holiness are two different things, unfortunately.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Strange Horizons interview (2008)

Life , Pain , People , Disease

“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)

People , Truth , Lie , Question

“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)

Sport , God , Faith , Drink

“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

Life , Intelligence , People

“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

God , People , Learning , History

“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)

Universe , Thinking

“Old gods sometimes do that in their retirement. They become galactic social workers, self-appointed do-gooders.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Margarets (2007), Chapter 53, “We Margarets Walk” (p. 502)

God

“What kind of a universe would it be if we could not do small kindnesses for one another?”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Marianne Trilogy, Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods (1988), Chapter 17 (p. 123)

Universe