Sheri S. Tepper Quotations

Boys play with death as though it were a game, cutting their teeth on daggers.

I think... girls have a hard time being interesting. It’s actually easier to be famous, or notorious, than it is to be interesting. In our world, girls climb very well until they hit puberty-sexual maturity-and then they begin to fall out of the tree. They start role-playing instead of thinking, flirting instead of learning. They start admiring how smart the boys are-or how athletic or how handsome-instead of concentrating on their own intelligence.

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

As vocabulary is reduced , so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language he retrogresses!

I'm not sure a world run by women would be any better. They're human beings!

It may be important to write a book that doesn't come up to what I would like to have rather than to write no book at all.

To the Chasmites, truth is determined by how well it fits their expectations, and doesn't that sound familiar? ... They have consistently refused to have a god contest, and I fear they will have to encounter the godlet rather forcibly before they believe there is anything there at all.

The sooner we can separate salvageable skeptics from self-righteous absolutists, the sooner we can move along.

Creation has the truth written all over it - the age of the universe, the history of the world - but nine-tenths of mankind either don't know it or think it's a sham, because it isn't what their book or their prophet says, and it isn't cozy or manipulable enough.

The Regime has become so smug it can't tell the difference among the revolutionary, the innovative, or the merely various. The high command knows so little about the outside that if I came back with a fully equipped chemical laboratory and told them I'd found it in a cave, they'd probably believe that, so long as I brought it back peicmeal in my saddle bags, thus proving I hadn't known it was there beforehand.