“Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?”

“Please bring strange things.Please come bringing new things.Let very old things come into your hands.Let what you do not know come into your eyes.Let desert sand harden your feet.Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.Let the paths of your fingertips be your mapsAnd the ways you go be the lines of your palms.Let there be deep snow in your inbreathingAnd your outbreath be the shining of ice.May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.May your soul be at home where there are no houses.Walk carefully, well-loved one,Walk mindfully, well-loved one,Walk fearlessly, well-loved one.Return with us, return to us,Be always coming home.”

“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.”

“Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.”

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”

“It's your nature to be Tirin, and my nature to be Shevek, and our common nature to be Odonians, responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it, would be to lose our freedom. Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?”

“Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?”