Natalie Ironside

“Keep your head high,” I tell Tender. “Suck in your gut, Soldier! A grateful humanity wont forget you!”

He gives me a look, and I see that he’s in no mood for jokes. He’s right–this is no joke. But when you’re leaving for the Zone, it’s one of two things: you start bawling, or you crack jokes–and I’m sure as hell not crying. I take a look at Kirill. He’s holding up OK, only mouthing something silently, as if praying.

“Praying?” I ask. “Pray, pray! The farther into the Zone, the closer to heaven.”

“What?” He says.

“Pray!” I yell. “Stalkers cut in line at the gates of heaven!”

And he suddenly smiles and pats me on the back, as if to say, “Nothing will happen as long as you are with me, and if it does, well, we only die once.” God, he’s a funny guy.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

“I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”
― Ursula Le Guin

“Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
― Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West