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The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Ursula K. Le Guin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive”
“Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
“They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
“This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
“To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.”
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.”
“Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.”
“They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.”
“ Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: the refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can lick them, join them. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to loose hold of everything else.”
“Let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.”
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Book Keywords:
philosophical, walk-away, joy, complacency, happiness, omelas, pain, child, war, darkness, unknown, misery, guilt, intellectual, art