Sheri S. Tepper

Quotes

1. “Where did all the magic go, Janice?”

   “The Church took most of it,” she said, giving me this strange, wild-eyed glare.

   “The Church?” I asked stupidly. It was what Puck had said, but somehow I hadn’t believed it.

   “Making magic,” she said. “All their sacraments are magical. Turning this into that. Making spells to forgive sins. They don’t admit it’s magic, but that’s what it is! ‘The recitation of formulae by an elect, resulting in a condition contrary to reality, is magic.’ But there was only so much of it around. The fairies had it, then the Church took it, and now the Church is losing it to something else. The last days are coming. It’s been foretold.

   p. 315

2. 

   Sex was pleasurable, sure, but survival was sweeter still.

   p. 133

3. 

   “That’s different. That’s paradise. Like it was on Breadh.”

   “Were there many people on Breadh?”

   Snark laughed, abruptly joyous. “Hardly any! That’s what made it paradise!”

   p. 384

4. 

   Does the worm on the hook expect to be rescued simply because the fish have eaten all the other worms?

   p. 132

5. 

   According to Mama, nine-tenths of King Arthur was questing and the other tenth was politics.

   p. 241

6. 

   “Will you go home again?”

   Would I go home again? To the lies the songfathers told? To the pain of the House Without a Name? To that terrible destiny for my daughters? To connivance at that evil by my sons? To sell truth and wisdom short in order to buy the false hope of immortality?

   Somehow I got to my feet.

   “No,” I cried. My voice was the cry of a small bird against that mighty thunder. Still I cried, “No. I will not!”

   p. 428

7. 

   Thread and needles. To sew, so Mama had said, a cap of wisdom, a thinking cap. If one wanted a thinking cap. Mama hadn’t. Wisdom was the curse of man, she said. In seeking wisdom we had lost our heritage. I didn’t believe that. We hadn’t sought wisdom diligently enough, that’s how we’d lost our heritage. We preferred cleverness to wisdom. Instead of seeking the truth, we had preferred to believe in easy certainties. Always so much easier to take the lazy, easy way and then pretend God had commanded it.

   p. 444

8. 

   “Most gods of most worlds have human faces.”

   “Because men make them in their image,” Lutha remarked, somewhat bitterly. “To grant mankind license to do what we would do anyway.”

   p. 421

9. 

   We have been thwarted at every turn by god. Not the real God. A false one which has been set up by man to expedite his destruction of the earth. He is the gobble-god who bids fair to swallow everything in the name of a totally selfish humanity. His ten commandments are me first (let me live as I please), humans first (let all other living things die for my benefit), sperm first (no birth control), birth first (no abortions), males first (no women’s rights), my culture/tribe/language/religion first (separatism/terrorism), my race first (no human rights), my politics first (lousy liberals/rotten reactionaries), my country first (wave the flag, the flag, the flag), and, above all, profit first.

   p. 320

10. 

    I wept a time for Mama and for Israfel, but weeping does no good, does it? Sitting down and weeping is what women have done for centuries, and it has done no good at all. Nor praying. God has given us the earth. He is not waiting in the next room, ready to fix it for us if we ruin it. If we do not care for it, no one will. On other worlds, other races of men perhaps do better than we have done. He cares for us, but he does not control what we do.

    p. 458

11. 

    Godmongers have always found it easy to pay for their beliefs with women’s lives.…

    p. 300

12. 

    “The first rule of governance is never to choose who to sacrifice,” snarled the Procurator. “Or, at least, never to be seen to choose. Death and dismemberment must always be…inadvertent. Everybody’s fault or nobody’s fault!”

    p. 82