Sheri S. Tepper

Quotes

1. Fairy things don’t impress cats. Fairy things and holy things. Cats are, perhaps, a separate creation.

   p. 57

2. 

   “An itchy man is prey to discontent; he’ll suage his flea bites with the blood of kings.”

   Surely the common man wouldn’t want that!”

   “What common men want most is beer and sex, without disturbances.”

   p. 140

3. 

   Despite Lutha’s undoubted intelligence, she was constantly exploding like fireworks, laughing or crying, passionate about every trifle. On Dinadh, we think of such behavior as typical of children, not serious adults.

   p. 306

4. 

   The stories of Old-earth are shared among the people of Old-earth. Even I, Saluez, can identify elephant and whale, ostrich and eagle, serpent and wolf, though they exist no longer. I know that they were and now are not, because of mankind.

   p. 411

5. 

   “Even pain,” said the king, with no intention of being prophetic, “even pain is preferable to dying of unrelieved ennui.”

   p. 140

6. 

   There is no innocence so deep as to veil the urgencies of the flesh from one’s own youthful awareness.

   p. 404

7. 

   She sighed. “Things the Creator Himself made have perished, Beauty, because of what someone else does. The Holy One makes a tree that lives for four thousand years, and someone chops it down to make paper to package chewing gum. The Creator makes whales who sing in the deep, and men kill them to put their oil in lipsticks.”

   p. 426

8. 

   Think of how much time and effort it would have saved if we’d only known what man’s destiny actually was. Think of our time, all the fundamentalist fascists versus the civil libertines; all the liberals throwing our money at the poor versus the conservatives throwing our money at themselves; all the male versus female controversies, all the revolutions, sexual, political, and economic. How marvelous if we’d only known what was important and what wasn’t!

   p. 360

9. 

   Oh, I know what you Enforcers think about the council, Ertigon. We’d have to be complete fools not to know. You take us for pompous idiots, mostly, layabouts who spend our days eating and drinking and engaging in our effete little rituals, none of which mean anything, accomplish anything. You’re perfectly right, that’s what we are. But then, that’s what we were assigned to do. That’s what we’re here for. It’s what all public servants have always been: roadblocks, resistors, interceptors of change, valves designed to shut down the flow of events, inhibitors of revolution, delayers of evolution, servants of the status quo.

   p. 249

10. 

    Jory continued in a lecturer’s tone. “Old women like us, Cafferty, are left here to die. It would not be fitting for them to die where men who don’t own them might look upon them—and of course their owners don’t want to look at them—so they die here, where none see them. The religion of Thrasis prohibits murder. They are merely given no food or water and left to the mercy of the Thrasian God.”

    p. 332

11. 

    “We Enforcers have a saying: ‘the right help helps, and enough help helps, but help that’s in time helps most.’”

    p. 399

12. 

    “Oh, yes,” murmured Nela. “The only excuse we had for overpopulating our world was that it wouldn’t matter in heaven.” She tried to laugh but couldn’t manage it. The laugh turned into a sob.

    p. 360