Lois Lowry

“Oh the weather outside is frightful...”

“ليس الألم أسوأ ما فى الذكريات,بل الاحتفاظ بها وحدك..فالذكريات قد خلقت كى نعيشها مع الآخرين”

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

“Today is declared an unscheduled holiday.”

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

“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.”

“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!”

“I have learned over the course of my many years that it is a bad idea, usually, to investigate piteous weeping but always a fine thing to look into a giggle.”

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

“Mama was crying, and the rain made it seem as if the whole world was crying.”

“Mata batin yang merupakan berkah kesepian”

“Ellen had said that her mother was afraid of the ocean, that it was too cold and too big. The sky was, too, thought Annemarie. The whole world was: too cold, too big. And too cruel. ”

“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.”

“Lily appeared, wearing her nightclothes, in the doorway. She gave an impatient sigh. 'This is certainly a very LONG private conversation,' she said. 'And there are certain people waiting for their comfort object.'Lily,' her mother said fondly, 'you're very close to being an Eight, and when you're an Eight, your comfort object will be taken away. It will be recycled to the younger children. You should be starting to go off to sleep without it.'But her father had already gone to the shelf and taken down the stuffed elephant which was kept there. Many of the comfort objects, like Lily's, were soft, stuffed, imaginary creatures. Jonas's had been called a bear.Here you are, Lily-billy,' he said. 'I'll come help you remove your hair ribbons.”

“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.”

“We're all on our own, aren't we? That's what it boils down to. We come into this world on our own- in Hawaii, as I did, or New York, or China, or Africa or Montana- and we leave it in the same way, on our own, wherever we happen to be at the time- in a plane, in our beds, in a car, in a space shuttle, or in a field of flowers. And between those times, we try to connect along the way with others who are also on their own. If we're lucky, we have a mother who reads to us. We have a teacher or two along the way who make us feel special. We have dogs who do the stupid dog tricks we teach them and who lie on our bed when we're not looking, because it smells like us, and so we pretend not to notice the paw prints on the bedspread. We have friends who lend us their favorite books. Maybe we have children, and grandchildren, and funny mailmen and eccentric great-aunts, and uncles who can pull pennies out of their ears. All of them teach us stuff. They teach us about combustion engines and the major products of Bolivia, and what poems are not boring, and how to be kind to each other, and how to laugh, and when the vigil is in our hands, and when we have to make the best of things even though it's hard sometimes. Looking back together, telling our stories to one another, we learn how to be on our own.”

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

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

“Then I went home to continue my life, which had changed a little, as lives do every day, inching by microspecks forward toward whatever surprises are coming next.”

“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.”

“You remember that I told you it was safer not to know. But,' he went on, as his hands moved wuth their sure and practiced motion, 'I will tell you just a little, because you were so very brave.'Brave?' Annemarie asked, surprised. 'No, I wasn't. I was very frightened.'You risked your life.'But I didn't even think about that! I was only thinking of-'He interrupted her,smiling. 'That's all that brave means-not thinking about the dangers. Just thinking about what you must do. Of course you were frightened. I was too, today. But you kept your mind on what you had to do. So did I.”

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

“Teasing's part of the fun that comes before kissing”

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

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

“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.”

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

“Genius disregards the boundaries of propriety. Genius is permitted to shout if shouting is productive.”

“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”

“I didn't understand the war. It was new, and they all said it would be there for a long time, but where it was, exactly, was one of the things I didn't understand. It seemed to be out-of-doors, and that was why we had the blackout curtains, so that we didn't have to look at it at night–or it didn't have to look at us, perhaps. Yet on some nights we sat on the balcony and watched searchlights play across the dark sky, and that had to do with the war, too. So the war was in the sky, somehow.And it was there in the daytime, though I was not sure where. It was why sometimes, during school, whistles blew, and we had to run to the subway station.”

“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. ”

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

“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.[from her Newberry Award acceptance speech]”

“...now he saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently. He saw all of the light and color and history it contained and carried in its slow - moving water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going”

“You eat canned tuna fish and you absorb protein. Then, if you're lucky, someone give you Dover Sole and you experience nourishment. It's the same with books.”

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

“And I could test myself - my own courage - with it, too, because when the doors at either end of the secret staircase were closed, it was impenetrably dark. I hid in the staircase, shivering with terror, telling the narrative: The little girl was in a dark, dark place but she was very brave...Sometimes the door at the bottom opened, and a wedge of light sliced up the stairs; a maid, her arms filled with folded laundry, would find me and ask in amazement what I was doing there.And though I answered lightheartedly that I was playing, the truth is that I was not entirely certain what I was doing there, crouched and frightened in the darkness. Only now, sixty years later, do I see that I was arming myself, rehearsing panic, loss, and helplessness; assessing my own cowardice and courage, and and the same time reassuring myself that the door would always open, that the light would always find its way in.”

“It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.”

“Memory is the happiness of being alone.”