Go, ” he said. “This is your journey, your battle. Be brave. Find your gift. Use it to save what you love.

But there’s a whole world waiting, still, and there are good things in it.

It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.

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...

It was because someone who was a real friend was having the exact same feelings I was having, about something that was more important to me than anything else. I bet there are people who...

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.

When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong, every single time.

I cannot kill someone, he thought.

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.

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

Teasing’s part of the fun that comes before kissing

…and I want you all to remember-that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of...

starving” was to speak a lie. An unintentioned lie, of course. But the reason for precision of language was to ensure that unintentional lies were never uttered. Did he understand that? they asked him. And...

Dangers were no more than odd imaginings, like ghost stories that children made up to frighten one another: things that couldn’t possibly happen.

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...

We’re so accustomed to laughing. It’s harder for us when the time comes that we can’t laugh.

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...

I feel sorry for anyone who is in a place where he feels strange and stupid.

You know, sometimes it’s nice to just have someone to blame, even if it has to be yourself, even if it doesn’t make sense.

It was the helplessness that scared the both of us.

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?

Lily appeared, wearing her nightclothes, in the doorway. She gave an impatient sigh. ‘This is certainly a very LONG private conversation,’ she said. ‘And there are certain people waiting for their comfort object.’Lily,’ her mother...

You remember that I told you it was safer not to know. But,’ he went on, as his hands moved wuth their sure and practiced motion, ‘I will tell you just a little, because you...

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

It wasn’t the same. I’m pretty good at making the best of things, but it wasn’t the same.

He remembered that in the art books he had leafed through at Leader’s, many paintings depicted death. A severed head on a platter. A battle, and the ground strewn with bodies. Swords and spears and...

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...

Oh, sometimes it’s just easier to please people,” Maria said finally.

Henry glared at Anastasia. ‘You quit planning on a rich husband, Anastasia. You’re gonna get rich on your own. You and me, if we want husbands, fine. But we won’t need them. Like our mothers....

He wept because he was afraid now that he could not save Gabriel. He no longer cared about himself

It’s a funny thing about names, how they become a part of someone.

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

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...

The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.

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

Memory is the happiness of being alone.

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...

We’re the ones who will fill in the blank places. Maybe we can make it different.

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

Ellen had said that her mother was afraid of the ocean, that it was too cold and too big. The sky was, too, thought Annemarie. The whole world was: too cold, too big. And too...

The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.

And here in this room, I re-experience the memories again and again it is how wisdom comes and how we shape our future.

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...

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

I laugh, because he knew what I was thinking, and very few people ever know what I’m thinking.

It’s hard to give up the being together with someone.

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

…you can pretend that bad things will never happen. But life’s a lot easier if you realize and admit that sometimes they do.

I brug you two [gifts]..I gots thelittle 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’...

She’s sure, absolutely sure, that what she’s waiting for will happen, just the way she wants it to; and I’m so uncertain, so fearful my dreams will end up forgotten somewhere, someday, like a piece...