Top 200 Lois Lowry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Lois Lowry

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

— Lois Lowry

3. “Every ‘no’ means you are that much closer to a ’yes.”

— Lois Lowry

4. “Take pride in your pain; you are stronger than those who have none.”

— Lois Lowry

5. “Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps the singing bird will come.”

— Lois Lowry

6. “The fact that I lost my son permeates my being.”

— Lois Lowry

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

— Lois Lowry

8. “It’s the choosing that’s important, isn’t it?”

— Lois Lowry

9. “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

10. “Today is declared an unscheduled holiday.”

— Lois Lowry

11. “I believe without a single shadow of a doubt that it is necessary for young people to learn to make choices. Learning to make right choices is the only way they will survive in an increasingly frightening world.”

— Lois Lowry

12. “Fear dims when you learn things.”

— Lois Lowry

13. “We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.”

— Lois Lowry

14. “You have the colors,” The Giver told him. “And you have the courage. I will help you to have the strength.”

— Lois Lowry

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

— Lois Lowry

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

— Lois Lowry

17. “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

18. “What’s important is the preparation for adult life, and the training you’ll receive in your Assignment.”

— Lois Lowry

19. “Reading is the most important way to prepare for life.”

— Lois Lowry

Featured in: Reading Quotes

20. “Thank you for your childhood.”

— Lois Lowry

21. “Think only on the climb. Think on what you control.”

— Lois Lowry

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

— Lois Lowry

23. “I think ‘The Giver’ is such a moral book, so filled with important truths, that I couldn’t believe anyone would want to suppress it, to keep it from kids.”

— Lois Lowry

24. “Evil can do anything, for a price.”

— Lois Lowry

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

— Lois Lowry

26. “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

27. “I don’t read young adult or children’s books, now that my grandchildren are beyond the age of my reading to them. I read reviews, and so I’m aware of what’s out there. But I tend not to read the books.”

— Lois Lowry

Featured in: Reading Quotes

28. “Of course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything.”

— Lois Lowry

29. “The mind can’t explain it, and you can’t make it go away. It’s called love.”

— Lois Lowry

30. “If everything’s the same, then there aren’t any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things!”

— Lois Lowry

31. “It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.”

— Lois Lowry

32. “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

33. “It be better, I think, to climb out in search of something, instead of hating, what you’re leaving.”

— Lois Lowry

34. “There was just a moment when things weren’t quite the same, weren’t quite as they had always been through the long friendship.”

— Lois Lowry

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

— Lois Lowry

36. “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

37. “People in the know say The Giver was the first young adult dystopian novel.”

— Lois Lowry

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

38. “Because of fear, they made shelter and found food and grew things. For the same reason, weapons were stored, waiting.”

— Lois Lowry

39. “I turn to books for a feeling of companionship: for somebody knowing what I have known.”

— Lois Lowry

40. “She kept lists of her favorite words.”

— Lois Lowry

41. “I see all of them. All the colors.”

— Lois Lowry

42. “I’m not terribly conversant with children’s literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult.”

— Lois Lowry

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

— Lois Lowry

44. “If you were to be lost in the river, Jonas, your memories would not be lost with you. Memories are forever.”

— Lois Lowry

45. “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

46. “Sometimes I wish they’d ask for my wisdom more often – there are so many things I could tell them; things I wish they would change. But they don’t want change. Life here is so orderly, so predictable – so painless. It’s what they’ve chosen.”

— Lois Lowry

47. “Memory is the happiness of being alone.”

— Lois Lowry

48. “What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong?”

— Lois Lowry

49. “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

50. “She would die, Claire realized, before she would give up the love she felt for her son.”

— Lois Lowry