Lois Lowry

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.

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

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

Go, " he said. "This is your journey, your battle. Be brave. Find your gift. Use it to save what you love.

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.

Honor,' he said firmly. 'I have great honor. So will you. But you will find that that is not the same as power.

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.

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

...That's why we have the Museum, Matty, to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old.

It's hard to give up the being together with someone.

It was my journey and i had to do it without help. I had to find my own strengths, face my own fears.

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.

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

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.

I've always been fascinated by memory and dreams because they are both completely our own. No one else has the same memories. No one has the same dreams.

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

A stage adaptation of The Giver has been performed in cities and towns across the USA for years. More recently an opera has been composed and performed. And soon there will be a film. Does The Giver have the same effect when it is presented in a different way: It's hard to know. A book, to me is almost sacrosanct: such an individual and private thing. The reader brings his or her own history and beliefs and concerns, and reads in solitude, creating each scene from his own imagination as he does. There is no fellow ticket-holder in the next seat. 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.

I feel sorry for anyone who is in a place where he feels strange and stupid.