Lois Lowry
When I was a kid in the '50s, during the Eisenhower years, everything seemed to be working fine. I don't recall as a teenager ever worrying about the state of the future world.
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.
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.
I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like '1984' and 'Brave New World.'
My mind is always on whatever next project I'm working on.
I think teens are drawn to these speculative books that portray what might happen and what could happen.
There are those, I think, who are attracted to the glitz of celebrity life. I am not one of them.
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.
This may sound strange, but at a very early age, at around 3, I was aware that I was smarter than the other kids.
Because I have two houses, I invariably get immersed in a book and then discover it's at the other house.
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.
If we as writers could predict what readers grab on to, we would write it.
The writer after all is only half the book, the other half is the reader.Collection: Book
-a whole world can lie before someone, if love is there when one wakes.Collection: Inspirational Love
Reading is the most important way to prepare for life.Collection: Reading
It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.Collection: Children
Take pride in your pain; you are stronger than those who have noneCollection: Pain
There is something about that moment, when literature becomes accessible, and a door of the world opens.Collection: Doors
The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.Collection: Lonely
Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps the singing bird will come.Collection: Nature
Every 'no' means you are that much closer to a 'yes.Collection: Mean
It is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything.Collection: Brave
Evil can do anything, for a price.Collection: Evil
The community of the Giver had achieved at such great price. A community without danger or pain. But also, a community without music, color or art. And books.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Laughter
It's just that... without the memories it's all meaningless.Collection: Memories
Memory is the happiness of being alone.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Life
Things seem more when you’re little. They seem bigger, and distances seem farther.Collection: Distance
It be better, I think, to climb out in search of something, instead of hating, what you're leaving.Collection: Hate
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 destructionCollection: Past
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]Collection: Pain
...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 goingCollection: Moving
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.Collection: Two
People in the know say The Giver was the first young adult dystopian novel.Collection: People
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.Collection: Love
It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.Collection: December
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.Collection: Husband
It's a funny thing about names, how they become a part of someone.Collection: Funny Things
Think only on the climb. Think on what you controlCollection: Thinking
It's the choosing that's important, isn't it?Collection: Important
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.Collection: Children
That's why they call you Seer. You see more than most.Collection: Seers
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.Collection: Moving
And it was lonely, to yearn, all alone.Collection: Lonely
There was just a moment when things weren't quite the same, weren't quite as they had always been through the long friendshipCollection: Long
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.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Air