"Take pride in your pain; you are stronger than those who have none"
— Lois Lowry (Gathering Blue)

"Memory is the happiness of being alone."
— Lois Lowry (Anastasia Krupnik)

"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."
— Lois Lowry

"It is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything."
— Lois Lowry

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

"’... Why can’t everyone see them? Why did colors disappear?’
The Giver shrugged. ‘Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness... We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.’"
— Lois Lowry (The Giver)

"If you were to be lost in the river, Jonas, your memories would not be lost with you. Memories are forever."
— 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)

"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 (The Giver)

"It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened."
— Lois Lowry (The Giver)

"And I could test myself - my own courage - with it, too, because when the doors at either end of the secret staircase were closed, it was impenetrably dark. I hid in the staircase, shivering with terror, telling the narrative: The little girl was in a dark, dark place but she was very brave...Sometimes the door at the bottom opened, and a wedge of light sliced up the stairs; a maid, her arms filled with folded laundry, would find me and ask in amazement what I was doing there.

And though I answered lightheartedly that I was playing, the truth is that I was not entirely certain what I was doing there, crouched and frightened in the darkness. Only now, sixty years later, do I see that I was arming myself, rehearsing panic, loss, and helplessness; assessing my own cowardice and courage, and and the same time reassuring myself that the door would always open, that the light would always find its way in."
— Lois Lowry

""You eat canned tuna fish and you absorb protein. Then, if you're lucky, someone give you Dover Sole and you experience nourishment. It's the same with books.""
— Lois Lowry

"Genius disregards the boundaries of propriety. Genius is permitted to shout if shouting is productive."
— Lois Lowry

"Teasing's part of the fun that comes before kissing"
— Lois Lowry (Messenger)

"We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others."
— Lois Lowry

"He wept, and it felt as if the tears were cleansing him, as if his body needed to empty itself."
— Lois Lowry (Messenger)

"'I liked the feeling of love,' [Jonas] confessed. He glanced nervously at the speaker on the wall, reassuring himself that no one was listening. 'I wish we still had that,' he whispered. 'Of course,' he added quickly, 'I do understand that it wouldn't work very well. And that it's much better to be organized the way we are now. I can see that it was a dangerous way to live.'

...'Still,' he said slowly, almost to himself, 'I did like the light they made. And the warmth.'"
— Lois Lowry (The Giver)

"Today is declard an unscheduled holiday."
— Lois Lowry (The Giver)

"Once she read a book but found it distasteful because it contained adjectives."
— Lois Lowry (The Willoughbys)

"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."
— 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, The Giver, Ch. 13
"
— Lois Lowry

"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."
— Lois Lowry (The Willoughbys)

""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 (The Willoughbys)

"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

"The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared."
— Lois Lowry (The Giver)

"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."
— Lois Lowry

"Memories need to be shared."
— Lois Lowry (The Giver)

"Mata batin yang merupakan berkah kesepian"
— Lois Lowry

"ليس الألم أسوأ ما فى الذكريات,بل الاحتفاظ بها وحدك..فالذكريات قد خلقت كى نعيشها مع الآخرين"
— 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 (Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye)

"I didn't understand the war. It was new, and they all said it would be there for a long time, but where it was, exactly, was one of the things I didn't understand. It seemed to be out-of-doors, and that was why we had the blackout curtains, so that we didn't have to look at it at night–or it didn't have to look at us, perhaps. Yet on some nights we sat on the balcony and watched searchlights play across the dark sky, and that had to do with the war, too. So the war was in the sky, somehow.

And it was there in the daytime, though I was not sure where. It was why sometimes, during school, whistles blew, and we had to run to the subway station."
— Lois Lowry (Autumn Street)