Lois Lowry quotes:

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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • In 1952, when I was 15 and living on Governors Island, which was then First Army Headquarters, I encountered the newly-published 'The Catcher in the Rye.' Of course, that book became the iconic anti-establishment novel for my generation.

  • 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'm not terribly conversant with children's literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult.

  • Oddly, the military world is one of great sameness. There is an orderly quality to life on an army base, and even the children of the military are brought up with that sense of order and sameness.

  • I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like '1984' and 'Brave New World.'

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

  • I don't for one second think about the possibility of censorship when I am writing a new book. I know I am a person who cares about kids and who cares about truth and I am guided by my own instincts, and trust them.

  • When I create characters, I create a world to inhabit and they begin to feel very real for me. I don't belong in a psych ward, I don't think, but they become very real, like my own family, and then I have to say goodbye, close the door, and work on other things.

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

  • People are starting to refer to 'The Giver' as a classic, but I don't know how that is defined. But if it means that 10, 20, 50 years from now kids will still be reading it, that is kind of awe-inspiring.

  • The grand surprise has really been the fact that being an author, which to me had always implied being a private person, actually requires you to be a public person as well, and those are two separate entities to me.

  • 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 never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.

  • 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.

  • I would say that most of my books are contemporary realistic fiction... a couple, maybe three, fall into the 'historic fiction' category. Science fiction is not a favorite genre of mine, though I have greatly enjoyed some of the work of Ursula LeGuin. I haven't read much science fiction so I don't know other sci-fi authors.

  • 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.

  • I was fortunate to live for 3 years in another country, and although we lived in an American compound, still as a young adolescent I did venture into the world of the Japanese with great interest and enjoyment. But many Americans never left that safe and familiar life among their own people.

  • Most people remember being 4 objectively, as if they're seeing a movie of a 4-year-old. But me, if you ask me to think about when I'm 4, I can feel myself being 4, and I am there, looking out through my 4-year-old eyes.

  • I have been fortunate. I have done so many things and enjoyed so many things and had such a great life, not to imply that it is ending, but that there aren't many things that I feel I have left undone.

  • I believe without a single shadow of a doubt that it is necessary for young people to learn to make choices. Learning to make right choices is the only way they will survive in an increasingly frightening world.

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

  • People can lie in letters, but they tend not to. They certainly lie in memoirs.

  • Many of the books I loved as a kid, that even my mother read as a child, are very slow going. Today's children are not as patient. The best example of this is 'The Secret Garden,' which I adored as a child.

  • I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

  • I don't set out to transmit a message. I don't write with a political point of view. There are no religious overtones. Looking back at my books, I can say, 'Oh, yes, it is there.' But it's not in my mind when I write.

  • Often in the past, there have been authors that were deeply disappointed in their adaptation, but that's because they haven't accepted the fact that a movie is a different thing, and it can't possibly be the same as the book.

  • I think of every book as a single entity, and some have later gone on to become a series, often at the request of readers.

  • Kids have no sense of appropriateness. They can ask me whatever they want. You do develop a sense of intimacy with readers, and they tell you things about themselves. During a school year, I'll get e-mails asking about the books. I'll give them information, but I won't do their homework for them.

  • 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.

  • I don't read young adult or children's books, now that my grandchildren are beyond the age of my reading to them. I read reviews, and so I'm aware of what's out there. But I tend not to read the books.

  • If somebody takes the time, a: to read a book that I have written, and then to b: care about it enough to write me and ask questions, surely I owe them a response.

  • What comes to me always is a character, a scene, a moment. That's going to be the beginning. Then, as I write, I begin to perceive an ending. I begin to see a destination, although sometimes that changes. And then, of course, there's the whole middle section looming.

  • Because I have two houses, I invariably get immersed in a book and then discover it's at the other house.

  • If we as writers could predict what readers grab on to, we would write it.

  • It was harder for the ones who were waiting, Annemarie knew. Less danger, perhaps, but more fear.

  • Some books had shiny pages that showed paintings of landscapes unlike anything Matty had ever seen, or of people costumed in odd ways, or of battles, and there were many quiet painted scenes of a woman holding a newborn child.

  • 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.

  • Writing is hard work, and fun, and requires you to keep your backside in a chair when you would sometimes like to put it elsewhere. So the only wisdom is the advice to keep at it, I guess.

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • Time goes on, and your life is still there, and you have to live it. After a while you remember the good things more often than the bad. Then, gradually, the empty silent parts of you fill up with sounds of talking and laughter again, and the jagged edges of sadness are softened by memories.

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

  • There was just a moment when things weren't quite the same, weren't quite as they had always been through the long friendship

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

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

  • 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.

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

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

  • It was the helplessness that scared the both of us.

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

  • I'm trying to ruin it!" Will had bellowed back. "So I can figure out how to do it perfectly! How can you learn anything if you won't take risks?

  • I always set out to tell a good story, to create a character that young people can relate to, place them in a situation that will be interesting, intriguing, eventually suspenseful. But what I find is that after I do that, then there are themes that emerge, which teachers can then use to provoke discussion and debate.

  • I cannot kill someone, he thought.

  • ...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.

  • Maybe someday, if I succeed at something, I'll stop saying, "It isn't fair" about everything else.

  • I think teens are drawn to these speculative books that portray what might happen and what could happen.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • Memory is the happiness of being alone.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • People do things that turn out badly, often for the most benevolent of reasons.

  • '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.'

  • In my writing, I focus lenses. I'm almost always seeing when I am writing.

  • I'm a writer; I like to retain subtlety and nuance.

  • As female hormones decrease, they're replaced with an overwhelming urge to grow delphinium.

  • When I moved from Cambridge, I donated all my fiction. I carefully cut out pages the authors had autographed for me. I didn't want those autographed books showing up on eBay.

  • This may sound strange, but at a very early age, at around 3, I was aware that I was smarter than the other kids.

  • I think when you've had success, publishers and reviewers and readers are willing to let you try something new if you've already proven yourself. They're excited about what you're doing, you have people interested in it, and actually waiting for it. It's empowering.

  • It's interesting that so many books now are published as the first in a series. It never occurred to me. Although 'The Giver' does have an ambiguous ending. I've heard about that from readers over the years.

  • 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.

  • ...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

  • 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.

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

  • And it was lonely, to yearn, all alone.

  • And they are beginning to realize that the world they live in is a place where the right thing is often hard, sometimes dangerous, and frequently unpopular.

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

  • But then everyone would be burdened and pained. They don't want that. And that's the real reason The Receiver is so vital to them, and so honored. They selected me--and you-to lift that burden from themselves.

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

  • 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?

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

  • Evil can do anything, for a price.

  • Fear dims when you learn things.

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

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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....

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 liked the feeling of love,' [Jonas] confessed. He glanced nervously at the speaker on the wall, reassuring himself that no one was listening. 'I wish we still had that,' he whispered. 'Of course,' he added quickly, 'I do understand that it wouldn't work very well. And that it's much better to be organized the way we are now. I can see that it was a dangerous way to live.' ...'Still,' he said slowly, almost to himself, 'I did like the light they made. And the warmth.

  • I make up the characters in my books, but of course my consciousness is filled with every child I've ever known, including my two grandchildren, my own kids (I had four) and especially myself as a child, because that person still lives inside me, too.

  • I see all of them. All the colors.

  • I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

  • I think 'The Giver' is such a moral book, so filled with important truths, that I couldn't believe anyone would want to suppress it, to keep it from kids.

  • I turn to books for a feeling of companionship: for somebody knowing what I have known.

  • If everyting's the same, then there aren't any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things!" (Jonas) "It's the choosing that's imortant, isn't it?" The Giver asked him.

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

  • It be better, I think, to climb out in search of something, instead of hating, what you're leaving.

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

  • 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.

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

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

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

  • It's just that... without the memories it's all meaningless.

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