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.
Ursula LeGuin, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
This works for the habits of making fairy tales darker and grittier, of the insistence that serious art doesn’t have happy endings, on the idea that romance and genre fiction are somehow less.
(via whilereadingandwalking)














