“(ghost of)ACHILLES: How can I force obedience on this? In other times I've used the fear of death to make a woman bow herself to me. If not the fear of her own death, then fear for someone else, a… — Sheri S. Tepper Copy Share Image
“We're so old that the winds of age echo along our ribs and pick at our eye sockets. We could be gone tomorrow. A… — Sheri S. Tepper Copy Share Image
Conflict acting on intelligence creates imagination. Faced with conflict, creatures are forced to imagine what will happen, where the next threat will come from.… — Sheri S. Tepper Copy Share Image
“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… — Sheri S. Tepper Copy Share
Do you realize it’s been only a century that we’ve been able to go from house to car to office to car to wherever, with the heater on, and the defroster on, protected from the rain and the cold? It hasn’t been much longer than that we’ve had lighting for streets. Think of all that darkness, all that world out… — Sheri S. Tepper Copy Share
[T]he scripture worshippers put the writings ahead of God. Instead of interpreting God's actions in nature, for example, they interpret nature in the light of the Scripture. 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… — Sheri S. Tepper Copy Share
“They will set aside what they have believed about the world, divesting themselves of all preconceptions, all judgments… They will do it, then they… — Sheri S. Tepper Copy Share Image
“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.” Nell objected, “We would have outgrown that…” The… — Sheri S. Tepper Copy Share
The sooner we can separate salvageable skeptics from self-righteous absolutists, the sooner we can move along. — Sheri S. Tepper Copy Share Image
There are writers who say they have no social responsibility except to write a good book, but that doesn't satisfy me. — Sheri S. Tepper Copy Share Image
“Rich people didn't get in that kind of mess. They never had. Only the poor got trapped: by ignorance, by religion, by self-righteous laws… — Sheri S. Tepper Copy Share Image
