The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

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.

letter sent me a couple of years ago by a young reader, who wrote:
The city of happiness, well, we all live there and people go about their business with full knowledge of the child in the closet.
And then at times I refuse to believe we are in the city of happiness and that instead we are all ones who walked away. Until I read in the news that a man was waterboarded 103 times in one month. Then I think we are all in the closet. Too stupid to understand what life we could have outside the walls around us

But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.