“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.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” p. 254 (originally published in New Dimensions 3, edited by Robert Silverberg)
Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1974
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

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Ursula K. Le Guin 292

American writer 1929–2018

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