Spencer > Spencer's Quotes

“Take pride in your pain; you are stronger than those who have none”
― Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue

“We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.

[from her Newberry Award acceptance speech]”
― Lois Lowry

“Memory is the happiness of being alone.”
― Lois Lowry, Anastasia Krupnick

“Of course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Teasing's part of the fun that comes before kissing”
― Lois Lowry, Messenger

“Gabe?"
The newchild stirred slightly in his sleep. Jonas looked over at him.
"There could be love", Jonas whispered.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“There is something about that moment, when literature becomes accessible, and a door of the world opens. ”
― Lois Lowry

“Today is declared an unscheduled holiday.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“...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”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“He knew that there was no quick comfort for emotions like those. They were deeper and they did not need to be told. They were felt.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“You may lie.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“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.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“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, The Giver

“What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong?”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Mama was crying, and the rain made it seem as if the whole world was crying.”
― Lois Lowry, Number the Stars

“He wept because he was afraid now that he could not save Gabriel. He no longer cared about himself”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Be proud of your pain, for you are stronger than those with none.”
― Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue

“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, The Giver

“His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?"
But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“It's hard to give up the being together with someone.”
― Lois Lowry, A Summer to Die

“- 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.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“The whole world had changed. Only the fairy tales remained the same. "And they lived happily ever after,”
― Lois Lowry, Number the Stars

“It be better, I think, to climb out in search of something, instead of hating, what you're leaving.”
― Lois Lowry, Son

“Memories are forever.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Genius disregards the boundaries of propriety. Genius is permitted to shout if shouting is productive.”
― Lois Lowry

“But there was nothing left to do but continue”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“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

“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.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“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.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver