Lois Lowry Quotes

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

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

Memory is the happiness of being alone.

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

...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.

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ 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.

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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....

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ Lois Lowry

Ravaged all,Bogo tabalTimore toronTotoo now gone...

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ 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.

~ Lois Lowry

Finally he steeled himself to read the final rule again. He had been trained since earliest childhood, since his earliest learning of language, never to lie. It was an integral part of the learning of precise speech. Once, when he had been a Four, he had said, just prior to the midday meal at school, “I’m starving.” Immediately he had been taken aside for a brief private lesson in language precision. He was not starving, it was pointed out. He was hungry. No one in the community was starving, had ever been starving, would ever be starving. To say “starving” was to speak a lie. An unintentioned lie, of course. But the reason for precision of language was to ensure that unintentional lies were never uttered. Did he understand that? they asked him. And he had.

~ Lois Lowry

It wasn't the same. I'm pretty good at making the best of things, but it wasn't the same.

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

It was because someone who was a real friend was having the exact same feelings I was having, about something that was more important to me than anything else. I bet there are people who go through a whole life and never experience that.

~ Lois Lowry

Things could change Gabe. Things could be different. I don't know how, but there must be some way for things to be different. There could be colors. And grandparents. And everybody would have memories. You know about memories...Gabe, there could be love.

~ Lois Lowry

Why do you and I have to hold these memories?''It gives us wisdom.

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry