Top 100 Lois Lowry Quotes
#2. Sometimes we have to hurt people, in order to keep ourselves whole. We must just do it with love, that's all.
Lois Lowry
#3. I'm grateful to you, Jonas, because without you I would never have figured out a way to bring about the change. But your role now is to escape. And my role is to stay.
Lois Lowry
#4. So many of my books, I don't want to say they have messages, but they have important things to say.
Lois Lowry
#5. No one else seemed to feel this kind of passionate attachment to other humans. Not to a newchild, not to a spouse, or a coworker, or friend. She had not felt it toward her own parents or brother. But now, toward this wobbly, drooling toddler -
Lois Lowry
#6. If you put pussy willows in water, they'll blossom and then die. Just put them in the vase alone, and they'll stay beautiful forever.
Lois Lowry
#7. Making lists of reasons was sometimes a good way to figure things out.
Lois Lowry
#8. When would he ever learn to stop saying "Look" to a man who had no eyes?
Lois Lowry
#9. It was an illusion. It was a tangled knot of fears and deceits and dark struggles for power that had disguised itself and almost destroyed everything. Now it was unfolding, like a flower coming into bloom, radiant with possibility.
Lois Lowry
#10. It's hard to leave the only place you've known.
Lois Lowry
#11. 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
Lois Lowry
#12. 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.
Lois Lowry
#13. He hunched his shoulders and tried to make himself smaller in the seat. He wanted to disappear, to fade away, not to exist.
Lois Lowry
#14. 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
#15. Somehow the first little Caleb had wandered away unnoticed,
Lois Lowry
#16. I see all of them. All the colors.
Lois Lowry
#17. It was simply a marking of time with no meaningful changes.
Lois Lowry
#18. The noise level subsided, as if people were distracted with
Lois Lowry
#19. Two children - one male, one female - to each family unit. It was written very clearly in the rules.
Lois Lowry
#20. Alys told her that it was the way of women, to tote a newborn and then adjust as it grew until by the time the child was plump and heavy, the weight seemed naught.
Lois Lowry
#21. She had seen the cindered fragments of her childhood life whirl into the sky as well.
Lois Lowry
#22. 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
#23. But their shoulders were as straight as they had been in the past: in the classroom, on the stage, at the Sabbath table. So there were other sources, too, of pride, and they had not left everything behind.
Lois Lowry
#24. Pretending that there are no choices to be made - reading only books, for example, which are cheery and safe and nice - is a prescription for disaster for the young.
Lois Lowry
#25. Artist?' Thomas suggested. 'That's a word. I've never heard anyone say it, but I've read it in some of the books. It means, well, someone who makes something beautiful. Would that be a word?
Lois Lowry
#26. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.
Lois Lowry
#27. 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.
Lois Lowry
#28. Although he had through the memories learned about the pain of loss and loneliness, now he gained too, an understanding of solitude and its joy.
Lois Lowry
#29. Gabe?"
The newchild stirred slightly in his sleep. Jonas looked over at him.
"There could be love", Jonas whispered.
Lois Lowry
#30. Once she read a book but found it distasteful because it contained adjectives.
Lois Lowry
#31. Now he knew that there were communities everywhere, sprinkled across the vast landscape of the known world, in which people suffered. Not always from beatings and hunger, the way he had. But from ignorance. From not knowing. From being kept from knowledge.
Lois Lowry
#32. Ou have more than you know. And people will want what you have.
Lois Lowry
#33. 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
#34. Fours, Fives, and Sixes all wore jackets that fastened down the back so that they would have to help each other dress and would learn interdependence.
Lois Lowry
#35. -a whole world can lie before someone, if love is there when one wakes.
Lois Lowry
#36. And I've thought of a way to help you with the concept of color.
Close your eyes and be still, now. I'm going to give you a memory of a rainbow.
Lois Lowry
#38. 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
#39. Don't grow much more, or you will be taller than I am, little Longlegs! Annemarie smiled, but Peter's comment was no longer the lighthearted fun of the past. It was only a brief grasp at something that had gone.
Lois Lowry
#40. They have never known pain, he thought. The realization made him feel desperately lonely.
Lois Lowry
#41. Oh, sometimes it's just easier to please people, Maria said finally.
Lois Lowry
#42. It was terrifying, almost unbelievable, the casualness of the cruelty.
Lois Lowry
#43. I think teens are drawn to these speculative books that portray what might happen and what could happen.
Lois Lowry
#44. 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
#45. It's just that ... without the memories it's all meaningless.
Lois Lowry
#46. Eating together as always: Lily chattering away, Mother and Father making their customary
Lois Lowry
#47. She fell asleep, and it was a sleep as thin as the night clouds, dotted with dreams that came and went like the stars.
Lois Lowry
#48. My work will be finished when I have helped the community to change and become whole.
Lois Lowry
#49. Mama was crying, and the rain made it seem as if the whole world was crying.
Lois Lowry
#50. For a contributing citizen to be released from the community was a final decision, a terrible punishment, an overwhelming statement of failure.
Lois Lowry
#51. If we as writers could predict what readers grab on to, we would write it.
Lois Lowry
#52. One hopes that with a book or movie, the reader or the audience will emerge from it thinking. That's the most you can hope for: that you've raised questions that will be there for the audience to think about later.
Lois Lowry
#53. 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
#54. Things seem more when you're little. They seem bigger, and distances seem farther.
Lois Lowry
#56. Fear was always a part of life for the people. Because of fear, they made shelter and found food and grew things. For the same reason, weapons were stored, waiting. There was fear of cold, of sickness and hunger.
Lois Lowry
#57. 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
#58. We are four worthy orphans with a no-nonsense nanny."
Like Mary Poppins?" suggested the man, with a pleased look of recognition.
Not one bit like that fly-by-night woman," Nanny said with a sniff. "It almost gives me diabetes just to think of her: all those disgusting spoonfuls of sugar!
Lois Lowry
#59. This new Caleb was a replacement child. The couple had lost their first Caleb, a cheerful little Four.
Lois Lowry
#60. In the schoolhouse, Mentor, the schoolteacher, gently tutored a mischievous eight-year-old named Gabe, who had neglected his studies to play and now needed help.
Lois Lowry
#61. That's why they call you Seer. You see more than most.
Lois Lowry
#62. It was against the rules for children or adults to look at another's nakedness; but the rule did not apply to newchildren or the Old. Jonas
Lois Lowry
#63. 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.
Lois Lowry
#64. This evening he almost would have preferred to keep his feelings hidden. But it was, of course, against the rules.
Lois Lowry
#65. Take pride in your pain; you are stronger than those who have none
Lois Lowry
#66. He remembered the excitement, the conversations at home, wondering about her: how she would look, who she would be, how she would fit into their established family unit.
Lois Lowry
#67. The class stared at the new girl with admiration. They had never met anyone like Gooney Bird Greene. She was a good student. She sat down at the desk Mrs. Pidgeon provided, right smack in the middle of everything, and began doing second grade spelling.
Lois Lowry
#68. Genius disregards the boundaries of propriety. Genius is permitted to shout if shouting is productive.
Lois Lowry
#69. Always better, less rude, to talk about things that were the same.
Lois Lowry
#70. 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.
Lois Lowry
#71. 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.
Lois Lowry
#72. Because of fear, they made shelter and found food and grew things. For the same reason, weapons were stored, waiting.
Lois Lowry
#73. Forgetting her promise of no questions, Littlest suddenly asked, "Might we be human?" But Fastidious did not reply.
Lois Lowry
#74. 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.
Lois Lowry
#75. I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like '1984' and 'Brave New World.'
Lois Lowry
#76. 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
#77. Why do some of us turn menacing?' she whispered.
Lois Lowry
#78. 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.
Lois Lowry
#79. The long neck that extended from his stiff collar.
Lois Lowry
#81. Outside, she knew, the sky was speckled with stars. How could anyone number them one by one, as the psalm said? There were too many. The sky was too big.
Lois Lowry
#82. Jonas felt a ripping sensation inside himself, the feeling of terrible pain clawing its way forward to emerge in a cry.
Lois Lowry
#83. There were more than usual this time. "It's a big group," Matty whispered to the blind man. "Yes, I can hear that it is. I wonder if somehow they have begun to hear rumors that we may close.
Lois Lowry
#84. The fact that I lost my son permeates my being.
Lois Lowry
#85. Walter cares more about what a book has to say than he does about whether he can turn it into a stuffed animal or a calendar or a movie.
Lois Lowry
#86. It was the helplessness that scared the both of us.
Lois Lowry
#87. Ravaged all,
Bogo tabal
Timore toron
Totoo now gone ...
Lois Lowry
#88. 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.
Lois Lowry
#89. I cooked for him like a wife and washed his clothes and was a wife in other ways too terrible to mention.
Lois Lowry
#91. 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
#92. CONSPIRACY is a plan to do something subversive. Three guys planning a camping trip . . . nah, that's just three guys planning a camping trip. But three guys planning to take a camping trip and rob a bank along the way . . . that's a conspiracy.
Lois Lowry
#93. There had been no real coffee in Copenhagen since the beginning of the Nazi occupation. Not even any real tea. The mothers sipped at hot water flavored with herbs. "Annemarie,
Lois Lowry
#94. He wept because he was afraid now that he could not save Gabriel. He no longer cared about himself
Lois Lowry
#95. 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
#96. 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.
Lois Lowry
#97. But to use the knowledge of the threading, you must learn the making of the shades. When to sadden with the iron pot. How to bloom the colors. How to bleed.
Lois Lowry
#98. I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.
Lois Lowry
#99. 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?
Lois Lowry
#100. Suddenly Kira knew that although her door was unlocked, she was not really free.
Lois Lowry
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