Lois Lowry Quotes

-a whole world can lie before someone, if love is there when one wakes.

Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps the singing bird will come.

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

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

The writer after all is only half the book, the other half is the reader.

Kids deserve the right to think that they can change the world.

The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.

We live in times that are in many ways ambiguous. Maybe that's why kids want precision in what they read - they don't like that moral ambiguity.

Take pride in your pain; you are stronger than those who have none

As a shy, introverted, scholarly child (long ago) I don't know what I would have done without libraries! My family moved often. I was always the new kid in town. The library always offered me my first and most important friendship: the place where I felt right at home. I still feel that way today, about libraries.

He wept, and it felt as if the tears were cleansing him, as if his body needed to empty itself.

It is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything.

Early on I came to realize something, and it came from the mail I received from kids. That is, kids at that pivotal age, 12, 13 or 14, they're still deeply affected by what they read, some are changed by what they read, books can change the way they feel about the world in general. I don't think that's true of adults as much.

People in the know say The Giver was the first young adult dystopian novel.

She was the only doctor's wife in Branford, Maine, who hung her wash on an outdoor clothesline instead of putting it through a dryer, because she liked to look out the window and see the clothes blowing in the wind. She had been especially delighted, one day, when one sleeve of the top of her husband's pajamas, prodded by the stiff breeze off the bay, reached over and grabbed her nightgown around the waist.

There is something about that moment, when literature becomes accessible, and a door of the world opens.

Fear dims when you learn things.

Evil can do anything, for a price.

Gabe?" The newchild stirred slightly in his sleep. Jonas looked over at him. "There could be love", Jonas whispered.

She fell asleep, and it was a sleep as thin as the night clouds, dotted with dreams that came and went like the stars.

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.

Every 'no' means you are that much closer to a 'yes.

It's the choosing that's important, isn't it?

I was a sidelines child: never class president, never team captain, never the one with the most valentines in my box.

And here in this room, I re-experience the memories again and again it is how wisdom comes and how we shape our future.

When I wrote 'The Giver,' it contained no so-called 'bad words.' It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic, and Utopian society. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism, pollution, or violence in the world of 'The Giver'; there was also careful attention paid to language: to its fluency, precision, and power.

Memory is the happiness of being alone.

What's important is the preparation for adult life, and the training you'll receive in your Assignment.

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

Now he saw another elephant emerge from the place where it had stood hidden in the trees. Very slowly it walked to the mutilated body and looked down. With its sinuous trunk it struck the huge corpse; then it reached up, broke some leafy branches with a snap, and draped them over the mass of torn thick flesh. Finally it tilted its massive head, raised its trunk, and roared into the empty landscape.

He wept because he was afraid now that he could not save Gabriel. He no longer cared about himself

I write books because I have always been fascinated by stories and language, and because I love thinking about what makes people tick. Writing a story... 'The Giver' or any other... is simply an exploration of the nature of behavior: why people do what they do, how it affects others, how we change and grow, and what decisions we make along the way.

You will be faced, now, with pain of a magnitude that none of us here can comprehend because it is beyond our experience. The Receiver himself was not able to describe it, only to remind us that you would be faced with it, that you would need immense courage.

Writing is self employment, so you can make your own schedule.

I often compare myself as a kid to my own grandchildren, who are around 11 and 14 now. That's the age kids usually read my book. And I remember myself, we'd gone through a world war. My father was an army officer so I was aware of what was going on. But I wasn't bombarded with images of catastrophe like many kids are today.

There's much more. There's all that goes beyond – all ... that is Elsewhere – and all that goes back, and back, and back. I received all of those, when I was selected. And here in this room, all alone, I re-experience them again and again. It is how wisdom comes. And how we shape our future.

Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with difference. We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.

We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.

If you were to be lost in the river, Jonas, your memories would not be lost with you. Memories are forever.

The whole world had changed. Only the fairy tales remained the same. "And they lived happily ever after.

The mind can’t explain it, and you can’t make it go away. It’s called love.

He hunched his shoulders and tried to make himself smaller in the seat. He wanted to disappear, to fade away, not to exist.

Of course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything.

Sometimes I wish they'd ask for my wisdom more often - there are so many things I could tell them; things I wish they would change. But they don't want change. Life here is so orderly, so predictable - so painless. It's what they've chosen.

Always in the dream, it seemed as if there were a destination: a something--he could not grasp what-that lay beyond the place where the thickness of snow brought the sled to a stop. He was left, upon awakening, with the feeling that he wanted, even somehow needed, to reach the something that waited in the distance. The feeling that it was good. That it was welcoming. That it was significant. But he did not know how to get there.

For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing. Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps, it was only an echo.

Even trained for years as they all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?

Making lists of reasons was sometimes a good way to figure things out.

I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness.

I knew that there had been times in the past-terrible times-when people had destroyed others in haste,in fear, and had brought about their own destruction