Lois Lowry

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.

Memory is the happiness of being alone.

Over and over. They be making me remember everythings. Me old songs, they just be natural. But now they be stuffing new things into me and this poor head hurts horrid.

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.

She's sure, absolutely sure, that what she's waiting for will happen, just the way she wants it to; and I'm so uncertain, so fearful my dreams will end up forgotten somewhere, someday, like a piece of string and a paperclip lying in a dish.

Dying is a very solitary thing. The only thing we can do it be there when she wants us there.

That had day changed him. It had changed the entire village. Shaken by the death of a boy they had loved, each person found ways to be more worthy of the sacrifice he had made. They had become kinder, more careful, more attentive to one another.

Looking back together, telling our stories to one another, we learn how to be on our own.

Ravaged all,Bogo tabalTimore toronTotoo now gone...

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.

I laugh, because he knew what I was thinking, and very few people ever know what I'm thinking.

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....

... and she was awed to see that vibrant life still struggled to thrive despite such destruction.

We're the ones who will fill in the blank places. Maybe we can make it different.

Oh, sometimes it's just easier to please people," Maria said finally.

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.

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

We're so accustomed to laughing. It's harder for us when the time comes that we can't laugh.