Top 153 Quotes & Sayings by Lois Lowry - Page 3

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

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.

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

I don't know what you mean when you say 'the whole world' or 'generations before him.'I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.

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.

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

For a contributing citizen to be released from the community was a final decision, a terrible punishment, an overwhelming statement of failure.

And it was lonely, to yearn, all alone.

Gathering Blue' was a separate book. I wanted to explore what a society might become after a catastrophic world event. Only at the end did I realize I could make it connect to 'The Giver.

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

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.

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

I tend not to think about audience when I'm writing. Many people who read "The Giver" now have their own kids who are reading it. Even from the beginning, the book attracted an audience beyond a child audience.

I don't know what she is now. A stranger, mostly. It's as if she has become a part of a different world, one that doesn't include me anymore.

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

So actually, there could be parents-of-the-parents-of-the-parents-of-the parents?

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.

- My instructors in science and technology have taught us about how the brain works. It's full of electrical impulses. It's like a computer. If you stimulate one part of the brain with an electrode, it... - They know nothing.

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]

It's a funny thing about names, how they become a part of someone.

...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

His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?" But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.

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

Think only on the climb. Think on what you control

I left home at the correct time but when I was riding along near the hatchery, the crew was separating some salmon, I guess I just got distraught, watching them.

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.

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.

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.

That's why they call you Seer. You see more than most.

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

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

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

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