Raindancer

“Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.”
― Ursula K Le Guin

“Seren Pedac's attention remained on the approaching Tiste Edur. A hunter. A killer. One who probably also possessed the trait of long silences. She could imagine this Binadas, sharing a fire in the wilderness with Hull Beddict. In the course of an evening, a night and the following morning, perhaps a half-dozen words exchanged between them. And, she suspected, the forging of a vast, depthless friendship. These were the mysteries of men, so baffling to women. Where silences could become a conjoining of paths. Where a handful of inconsequential words could bind spirits in an ineffable understanding. Forces at play that she could sense, indeed witness, yet ever remaining outside them. Baffled and frustrated and half disbelieving.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Защо се пишат книги, стихове, музика, рисуват се картини?
(...)
Защото дълбоко в душата си всеки поет таи надежда да повлияе на света.
Той, естествено, разбира, че никоя книга не е превъзпитала един кучи син. Кучите синове, кой знае защо, не се превъзпитават. Било защото не четат полезните за тях книги, било защото тези книги още повече ги озлобяват. Било пък защото влиянието на книгата е толкова незначително, че угасва веднага след прочитането ѝ. И все пак онези, на които им се иска да променят света, вършат постоянно своята свята работа, защото искат света да стане като майчина длан. Защо е тъй неунищожимо желанието за такава работа?
Освен работата на всички, освен времето, което всичко промива и филтрира, съществува и индивидуалната надежда. Тя е в следното. Никой не може да гарантира, че неговата дума няма да се окаже решаваща, когато дойде нуждата от едно последно докосване, от една последна перушинка върху везните, които ще накарат родът човешки да възкръсне.”
― Михаил Анчаров, Самшитовый лес

“Universities are truly storehouses for knowledge: students arrive from school confident they know nearly everything, and they leave five years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? In the university, of course, where it is dried and stored.”
― Terry Pratchett