Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.

The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.