Quotes from Lois Lowry

He found that he was often angry, now: irrationally angry at his groupmates, that they were satisfied with their lives which had none of the vibrance his own was taking on. And he was angry at himself, that he could not change that for them.

It was terrifying, almost unbelievable, the casualness of the cruelty.

Frightened meant that deep, sickening feeling of something terrible about to happen.

you can pretend that bad things will never happen. But life's a lot easier if you realize and admit that sometimes they do.

When you care about someone and give them something special. Something that they treasire. That's a gift.

She smiles, and her eyes look as if they can see back into her memory, into all the things that have gone into making a person what they are.

You will fail. Then they will kill you. - Vandara to Kira, following Kira's trial.

But there's a whole world waiting, still, and there are good things in it.

and I want you all to remember—that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with pleasure feel he is a part of—something he can work and fight for.

He called after her as she walked away on the path. Alys? Why were we dancing? Take your mind there again, she called back. You'll remember! To herself she murmured, shaking her head with amusement as her eyes twinkled at her own memory. Only thirteen. But we was barefoot and flower-strewn and foolish with first love.

We are four worthy orphans with a no-nonsense nanny. Like Mary Poppins? suggested the man, with a pleased look of recognition. Not one bit like that fly-by-night woman, Nanny said with a sniff. It almost gives me diabetes just to think of her: all those disgusting spoonfuls of sugar!

You know, sometimes it's nice to just have someone to blame, even if it has to be yourself, even if it doesn't make sense.

Life here is so orderly, so predictable-so painless. It's what they've chosen.

He saw nothing except the endless ribbon of road unfolding in twisting narrow curves.

Dangers were no more than odd imaginings, like ghost stories that children made up to frighten one another: things that couldn't possibly happen.

She would die, Claire realized, before she would give up the love she felt for her son.

It was an illusion. It was a tangled knot of fears and deceits and dark struggles for power that had disguised itself and almost destroyed everything. Now it was unfolding, like a flower coming into bloom, radiant with possibility.

The important thing is that another medium—stage, film, music—doesn't obliterate a book. The movie is here now, on a big screen, with stars and costumes and a score. But the book hasn't gone away. It has simply grown up, grown larger, and begun to glisten in a new way.

Gay!' he chirped. 'Gay!' It was the way he said his own name.

But their shoulders were as straight as they had been in the past: in the classroom, on the stage, at the Sabbath table. So there were other sources, too, of pride, and they had not left everything behind.

It was so important to him, and he made it important to me: poetry, and language, and how we use it to remind ourselves of how our lives should be lived . . .

Jonas felt a ripping sensation inside himself, the feeling of terrible pain clawing its way forward to emerge in a cry.

Sometimes he awoke with a feeling of fragments afloat in his sleep, but he couldn't seem to grasp them and put them together into something worthy of telling at the ritual.

Precision of language, Jonah.