Lois Lowry Quotes

Do you know that I no longer see colors?Jonas's heart broke.

~ Lois Lowry

It's hard to leave the only place you've known.

~ Lois Lowry

We're all on our own, aren't we? That's what it boils down to. We come into this world on our own- in Hawaii, as I did, or New York, or China, or Africa or Montana- and we leave it in the same way, on our own, wherever we happen to be at the time- in a plane, in our beds, in a car, in a space shuttle, or in a field of flowers. And between those times, we try to connect along the way with others who are also on their own. If we're lucky, we have a mother who reads to us. We have a teacher or two along the way who make us feel special. We have dogs who do the stupid dog tricks we teach them and who lie on our bed when we're not looking, because it smells like us, and so we pretend not to notice the paw prints on the bedspread. We have friends who lend us their favorite books. Maybe we have children, and grandchildren, and funny mailmen and eccentric great-aunts, and uncles who can pull pennies out of their ears. All of them teach us stuff. They teach us about combustion engines and the major products of Bolivia, and what poems are not boring, and how to be kind to each other, and how to laugh, and when the vigil is in our hands, and when we have to make the best of things even though it's hard sometimes. Looking back together, telling our stories to one another, we learn how to be on our own.

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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?

~ Lois Lowry

When you care about someone and give them something special. Something that they treasire. That's a gift.

~ Lois Lowry

Teasing's part of the fun that comes before kissing

~ Lois Lowry

To his surprise, Jean kissed him. So often in the past, teasing, she had said she would, one day. Now she did, and it was a quick and fragrant touch to his lips that gave him courage and, even before he started out made him yearn to come back home.

~ Lois Lowry

That day had changed him. It had changed the entire village. Shaken by the death of a boy they had loved, each person had 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

Now he saw another elephant emerge from the place where it had stood hidden in the trees. Very slowly it walked to the mutilated body and looked down. With its sinuous trunk it struck the huge corpse; then it reached up, broke some leafy branches with a snap, and draped them over the mass of torn thick flesh. Finally it tilted its massive head, raised its trunk, and roared into the empty landscape.

~ Lois Lowry

I cannot kill someone, he thought.

~ Lois Lowry

It was the helplessness that scared the both of us.

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

The whole world had changed. Only the fairy tales remained the same.

~ Lois Lowry

I brug you two [gifts] . . . I gots the little here in my pockie.' He dug one hand deep into his pocket and pulled out a handful of nuts and a dead grasshopper. 'Nope. Be the other side.' (Matt)

~ Lois Lowry

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

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ Lois Lowry

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.

~ Lois Lowry