Quotes from Lois Lowry

They have never known pain, he thought. The realization made him feel desperately lonely.

The whole world had changed. Only the fairy tales remained the same.

It is so good to have friends who understand how there is a time for crying and a time for laughing, and that sometimes the two are very close together.

Because of fear, they made shelter and found food and grew things. For the same reason, weapons were stored, waiting.

Take pride in your pain, her mother had always told her. You are stronger than those who have none.

how could you describe a hill and snow to someone who had never felt height or wind or that feathery, magical cold?

Things seem more when you're little. They seem bigger, and distances seem farther.

The worse part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.

The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.

It was as simple as that. Once he had yearned for choice. then, when he had had a choice, he had made the wrong one: the choice to leave. And now he was starving. But if he had stayed... His thoughts continued. If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways. He would have lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love.

He was free to enjoy the breathless glee that overwhelmed him: the speed, the clear cold air, the total silence, the feeling of balance and excitement and peace.

But why can't everyone have the memories? I think it would seem a little easier if the memories were shared. You and I wouldn't have to bear so much by ourselves, if everybody took a part. The Giver sighed. You're right, he said. But then everyone would be burdened and pained. They don't want that. And that's the real reason The Receiver is so vital to them, and so honored. They selected me - and you - to lift that burden from themselves.

you have more than you know. And people will want what you have.

It was harder for the ones who were waiting, Annemarie knew. Less danger, perhaps, but more fear.

And it was lonely, to yearn, all alone.

A book, to me, is almost sacrosanct: such an individual and private thing. The reader brings his or her own history and beliefs and concerns, and reads in solitude, creating each scene from his own imagination as he does. There is no fellow ticket-holder in the next seat.

For all for children To whom we entrust the future

If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways.

All of it was new to him. After a life of Sameness and predictability, he was awed by the surprises that lay beyond each curve of the road.

I'm going to give you the memory of a rainbow.

an urge, a need, a passionate yearning to share the warmth with the one person left for him to love.

That's why we have the Museum, Matty, to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old.

He gestured toward her twisted leg. Like you. Some don't walk good. Some be broken in other ways. Not all. But lots. Do you think it maken them quiet and nice, to be broken?

Once she read a book but found it distasteful because it contained adjectives.