They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into thedarkness, 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...
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,
The prisoner is the jailer's jailer.
Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a f...
She was so elaborately and ostentatiously a female body that she seemed scarcely to be a human being.
Paradise is for those who make Paradise.
Of course it happened. An effective dream is a reality, Dr. Haber.
No matter how humble the spirit it’s offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression.
I have this, this gift, I know that; and I know my obligation to it.
I hate complaining to strangers -- you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well.
Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alo...
Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs t...
But I can't say that gratitude was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the point whe...
And so, because he won't let himself be hurt, he does wrong to those he loves best. And then he sees that, and after all, it hurts him.
The social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don't cooperate--we . We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing....
You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth?
He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride.
If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even.
In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.
We live well in the houses, well enough, but we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars. Now, we dare not go 100 miles from home. We keep a little knowledge an...