Quotes from Lois Lowry

Jonas was careful about language.

It was a long time ago. Though it seems, sometimes, that most things that matter happened a long time ago, that is not really true. What is true is this: bu the time you realize how much something mattered, time has passed; by the time it stops hurting enough that you can tell about it, first to yourself, and finally to someone else, more time has passed; then, when you sit down to begin the telling, you have to begin this way: It was a long time ago.

Ellen was motionless on the sidewalk

It bothered him a little to lie about small things. But he always had; he had grown up lying, and he still found it strange that the people in this place where he now lived thought lying was wrong. To Matty, it was sometimes a way of making things easier, more comfortable, more convenient.

way, he had hoped he would not. His life would

hurry through the evening's last light to the homeplace, where the blind

Don't keep interrupting or I'll never finish the story.

We're the ones who fill in the blank spaces. Maybe we can make it different.

If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways. He would have lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love.

And things to wrap around the bottom of an infant. Not dishtowels." "Pampers?" asked the grocer. "I am an old-fashioned gentleman." "Diapers, then?" suggested the grocer. "Or, if you are truly old-fashioned, they would be called nappies." "Yes, those.

Our gifts are our weaponry

This new Caleb was a replacement child. The couple had lost their first Caleb, a cheerful little Four.

He remembered that in the art books he had leafed through at Leader's, many paintings depicted death. A severed head on a platter. A battle, and the ground strewn with bodies. Swords and spears and fire; and nails being pounded into the tender flesh of a man's hands. Painters had preserved such pain through beauty.

He didn't want the memories, didn't want the honour, didn't want the wisdom, didn't want the pain.

He had seen a birthday party, with one child singled out and celebrated on his day, so that now he understood the joy of being an individual, special and unique and proud.

Mama, what is this?" she asked suddenly, reaching into the grass at the foot of the steps. Mama looked. She gasped. "Oh, my God," she said. Annemarie picked it up. She recognized it now, knew what it was. It was the packet that Peter had given to Mr. Rosen. "Mr. Rosen tripped on the step, remember? It must have fallen from his pocket. We'll have to save it and give it back to Peter." Annemarie handed it to her mother. "Do you know what it is?

Some books had shiny pages that showed paintings of landscapes unlike anything Matty had ever seen, or of people costumed in odd ways, or of battles, and there were many quiet painted scenes of a woman holding a newborn child.

Honor," he said firmly. "I have great honor. So will you. But you will find that that is not the same as power.

There were only two occasions of release which were not punishment. Release of the elderly, which was a time of celebration for a life well and fully lived; and release of a newchild, which always brought a sense of what-could-we-have-done. This was especially troubling for the Nurturers, like Father, who felt they had failed somehow. But it happened very rarely.

But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.

My work will be finished when I have helped the community to change and become whole.

It was so - oh, I wish language were more precise! The red was so beautiful!

He sat in his dwelling alone, watching through the window, seeing children at play, citizens bicycling home from uneventful days at work, ordinary lives free of anguish because he had been selected, as others before him had, to bear their burden.

there were communities everywhere, sprinkled across the vast landscape of the known world, in which people suffered. Not always from beatings and hunger, the way he had. But from ignorance. From not knowing. From being kept from knowledge.