• 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. (loc. 67-70)
  • Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. (loc. 76-77)
  • The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. (loc. 94-95)
  • 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. (loc. 126-130)
  • 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. (loc. 136-138)
  • It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. (loc. 146-148)
  • 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. (loc. 156-159)
  • Games and stories are imitations of life, ways of playing at life, sometimes ways of learning how to live. Some of the rules may appear both cruel and arbitrary. But if you want to play the game, or live the life, you have to follow them. (loc. 168-170)
  • A story can say different things to different people. It may have no definitive reading. (loc. 200-201)
  • Omelas already exists: no need to build it or choose it. We already live here – in the narrow, foul, dark prison we let our ignorance, fear, and hatred build for us and keep us in, here in the splendid, beautiful city of life. (loc. 209-210)