Conflict acting on intelligence creates imagination. Faced with conflict, creatures are forced to imagine what will happen, where the next threat will come from. If there has never been conflict, imagination never develops. Wits arise in answer to danger, to pain, to tragedy. No one ever got smarter eating easy apples.
Sheri S. TepperTo me, fantasy has always been the genre of escape, science fiction the genre of ideas. So if you can escape and have a little idea as well, maybe you have some kind of a cross-breed between the two.
Sheri S. TepperThe 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 piecemeal in my saddle bags, thus proving I hadn't known it was there beforehand.
Sheri S. TepperDo you realize itโs been only a century that weโve 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 hasnโt been much longer than that weโve had lighting for streets. Think of all that darkness, all that world out there, all that mystery that weโve turned into well-lighted concrete bunkers, safe and warm and dull.
Sheri S. TepperAll around the Mediterranean you'll find cultures that believe men can't control themselves and shouldn't have to try.
Sheri S. Tepper